


2+2=5

by nauticus



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Angst, Autism, Backstory, Brothers, Childhood, Community: sherlockbbc_fic, Cuddling and Snuggling, Derogatory Language, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Mental Health Issues, Sherlock-centric, Sibling Love, Siblings, Sign Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-13
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 14:59:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 33,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/382619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nauticus/pseuds/nauticus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is four years old and doesn’t have any words, but there’s a bird skeleton under a glass dome in his father’s study that he thinks might be his kindred spirit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bone-birds

**Author's Note:**

> Please pay attention to the warnings. Though the violence is not graphically described, it still may be triggering to some.
> 
> I am not an expert on the topics presented here. I am an expert on myself and my experience with autism. I have done my research and I hope that I have done this topic justice. I am open to constructive criticism, especially if I've gotten something blatantly wrong. I want to represent the ideas in this story with as much respect and accuracy as possible.
> 
> I have a [tumblr](http://nauticus.tumblr.com/) now that I post about writing and other fandom-y things, if you lovely readers wanted to check the progress of this story!
> 
> Unbetaed.

Sherlock is four years old and doesn’t have any words, but there’s a bird skeleton under a glass dome in his father’s study that he thinks might be his kindred spirit.

He can’t properly imagine it, but at one point the bird had been an alive and breathing thing, until it was caught and it wasn’t any longer. It was plucked and stripped and boiled and picked and bleached, and then it was put back together, painstakingly piece by minute piece until the figure that remained resembled what had once been. 

Sherlock doesn’t know it yet, but that bird is him.

But Sherlock is four years old and doesn’t have any words, and it makes life difficult for everyone. The therapists have told his parents he is nonverbal and is likely to remain that way. Sherlock doesn’t know what this means, doesn’t understand that he doesn’t have words and hasn’t a language. He thinks he just simply is and at four years old, that’s perfectly all right. He points to the red block when he’s asked to and he picks out the number two in a line up between two, five, and seven when he’s prompted. He’s praised and he preens, and the expensive therapists tell his parents that he’s a smart boy, but underneath their smiles, they’re both equally worried about what this actually means. No parent wishes for this.

Sherlock has an older brother. Mycroft is away most of the year at school, but comes home for the holidays. These are some of Sherlock’s favorite times, because he likes his brother and Mycroft pays attention to him and lets him hold his hand whenever he wants to, which is a lot, because Sherlock likes the physical support. But Mycroft is out wandering the grounds and Sherlock isn’t allowed to do that just yet, so he sits in their father’s study on the warm summer afternoon, little pale face pressed to the cool glass. 

He doesn’t imagine what it’s like out there. He sees details instead. Dark green grass and patches of tan, foot prints in the dirt, blue sky and gray clouds on the horizon, mummy’s rose bushes she loves so much pruned to within an inch of their lives, three different types of birds, his brother walking slowly along the perimeter of the grounds. Sherlock doesn’t understand what all these details mean just yet, but he sees them nonetheless.

He first noticed the bird under glass a week previously and it’s all Sherlock can think about. Any time he wanders by the door, he thinks about it, about it’s details. He’s not usually allowed in there, but today his father is feeling generous and allows Sherlock in, and it’s all he can do to keep his little body from buzzing in excitement. He’s gone around and organized some of his father’s things. Things like books have been stacked largest to smallest and the chess pieces have been arranged black, white, black, white and smallest to largest from left to right. Sherlock feels good about those.

There’s an antique atlas on a table that Sherlock is thoroughly immersed in. His father had set him up on the tabletop to keep him entertained as he takes an important call, and Sherlock’s too busy tracing his tiny fingers over boarders of countries and dark blue rivers to notice he’s been left to his own devices. He’s careful with the pages as he turns them and wonders if his father will let him add this atlas to Sherlock’s collection of books in the nursery. That no could be a potential answer doesn't factor in.

Soon though, Sherlock grows tired of the big atlas and when he glances up on the shelf above him, he sees it. The bird is there, elegantly perched, tiny bone wings spread wide. 

In the end, it’s not really Sherlock’s fault. He can’t always help the things he fixates on. He doesn’t understand that sometimes he can’t have the things he yearns for. The bird has so many intricate lines and joints and details that Sherlock wants to explore, to touch, to taste, to look at it. He makes a quiet sound in the back of his throat as he stands up on his tiptoes, little hand gripping the shelf in front of him for more leverage. 

It’s not his fault, because his father is too engrossed in his conversation to pay attention. It’s not his fault that Sherlock recently learned how to climb with great efficiency, so scaling a few shelves didn’t even cause him to bat an eyelash. It’s not his fault that the world is made up of fragile things like delicate bone-birds under glass that shatter upon impact with the hardwood floors seven feet below.

Before he even has a chance to look at all the glorious details, Sherlock is pulled roughly from the tabletop by his upper arm, and the voice shouting at him is much too loud, much too vivid. Sherlock’s immediate reaction is to look away, avoid eye contact, and hope that the sensations stop. He doesn’t understand what is happening to him or why it’s happening, just that he’s severely overwhelmed and without ways to cope, he breaks down. 

He lets out his own shrill little cry as he tries his hardest to wriggle out of his father’s too tight grasp, his hands held up, postured and rigid. He no longer feels a part of himself, and it’s the most frightening thing to happen to Sherlock. It happens quite often, set off by various things, but this is time is different.

The therapists said that intimidation isn’t the proper way to communicate with Sherlock, but sometimes his mother and father do so anyway. It’s worked perfectly well for Mycroft, after all, and they’re of the mind that all it will take is a little conditioning and Sherlock will be just as normal as the next child. He’s been yelled at before for things he’s done that neither his mother nor father approved of. He’s been sent to the nursery for a cool down. He’s had things taken away from him as punishment. But he’s never been shouted out to this degree before. He thinks he’s never seen his father so upset and he wonders what happened to make him that way, not realizing it was something he’s done.

There’s a sharp crack as Sherlock’s father backhands him and then complete silence that seems to stretch out for hours, days even, where Sherlock is trying to register what happened and why his cheek and nose burn and throb, and why there’s wetness under his nose and dribbling down his chin, where his father looks at him in horror at the realization of what he’s just done. There’s no point in mentioning that he didn’t mean to hit his son, because the excuses he comes up with are pathetic.

He says them anyway. “I just want you to be quite for five damn minutes, Sherlock! That’s all! Five minutes of peace. Five minutes without you getting into everything. Five _fucking_ minutes!”

But panic soon begins to take over and with it comes the realization that he has just struck his own child hard enough to injure, and he knows there is never a good enough reason for that. It’s not the same thing as when he spanks the boys for disobeying. This is something darker, more terrifying, and something he sincerely wishes never happens again. 

It’s no excuse to try and rationalize it to himself under the guise that it’s difficult as a parent to have to deal with this. Not a day goes by that he doesn’t see Sherlock and automatically think _autistic_. The two are not mutually exclusive in reality, but it’s hard to separate them when his entire world for the last two years has revolved around Sherlock and his disability, and even harder to see Sherlock just as the little boy he is, who is curious about all sorts of things and likes to be flown around like an aeroplane.

All these thoughts and regrets and doubts pass in fleeting seconds, and then Sherlock is wailing and taking advantage of his father’s loosened grasp on his arm to pull away and flee the room entirely. His father knows he should reach out to him, knows he should comfort his son, but he walks back to his desk and shoves the neatly stacked pile of books off the top in anger instead.

Sherlock’s mother finds him an hour later, bent over the arm of a chair in one of the guest bedrooms with dried blood from his nose smeared across his rosy cheek and hands, his favorite puzzle on the seat in front of him. The wooden animals are all in their proper spots, and when he notices his mother there, he points to it and makes a small sound, looking for praise, because he knows that he’s done something important. 

“Sherlock… you’re making a mess,” she tuts, pulling him from the chair and setting him down on his feet. 

It’s not readily apparent that the blood is the result of something not so innocent like Sherlock getting a little too rambunctious and accidentally hurting himself, so his mother wipes his face and hands clean gently with a warm cloth, and then changes him into another shirt for supper, telling him that she expects him to be on his best behavior tonight at the dinner table.

Sherlock tries, and does very well when everything is routine and familiar. Most nights, he even manages to eat half of what’s put in front of him, so long as it’s what he likes. He’s fond of scrambled eggs and applesauce at the moment, and Mycroft even got him to try a bit of pasta from last night’s supper. But that night, things are a disaster from the start.

As they sit around the table, all eyes are on Sherlock’s face, cheek still a bit red from the impact and left eye starting to swell. It doesn’t seem to bother the little one, so they all force themselves to pretend that finger shaped welts aren’t clearly visible. Mycroft knows better than to ask what’s happened. He’s a smart boy after all, and knows the answer without needing to investigate further. Their mother doesn’t need to ask, because she can read it on her husband’s face.

They inadvertently ran out of eggs and the kitchen staff hasn’t had a chance to go for more, so between the bouts of heated nonverbal communication between the two of them, they try to talk Sherlock into trying a bit of the roast every one else is having, or attempting to have, because appetites aren’t quite what they’re meant to be that night. 

Mycroft sees his little brother become progressively more and more worked up until he reaches the point of no return, and he just knows a meltdown is imminent. There’s nothing he’s able to do there at the dinning table, not without disobeying his parents, who seem to think Mycroft causes more harm than good in regards to his little brother’s needs. So when the nonverbal communication escalates into shouting, mother and father trying to one up each other, and when Sherlock’s weak coping mechanisms shut off entirely and he dissolves into wailing and hitting the table top, Mycroft just sits there, staring blankly at his dinner plate and trying to tune out the all too familiar sounds of the Holmes family’s nightly ritual of screaming, arguing, and hurting.

Dinner is given up as a lost cause soon after Sherlock throws his plate on the floor. Their mother practically drags him back to the nursery and tells Mycroft to go to his room, which he obeys silently. There’s no use trying to get involved right now. So he sits at his desk and waits and waits until he’s sure their parents are locked in their room with their own demons. He waits and waits and listens as his little brother screams and pounds on the door and walls of the nursery.

It’s half past seven when Mycroft works up the courage to leave his room again. He can still hear shouting from the other side of the house telling him their parents weren’t done yet with whatever it was they were fighting about now. He had a feeling that it was most probably about what had happened to Sherlock’s face. Either way, that’s not his main concern at the moment. Sherlock is still howling in the nursery. He’s throwing things around now and Mycroft knows if he’s not distracted soon, he’ll do some serious damage to himself.

The kitchen is deserted when he slinks down there for the things he needs. He comes away with a tray loaded with two small cups of milk, half a cheese sandwich, a bag of frozen vegetables wrapped in a towel, and the children’s Tylenol, and makes his way quietly back to the nursery. The door isn’t locked, but in his rage, Mycroft thinks that Sherlock hasn’t figured that out yet.

It’s not an unfamiliar scene that greets him when he opens the door. There are toys and books strewn about the floor, all of Sherlock’s meticulous organization in ruins with the boy in question standing in the middle of it all, little hands twisted up and pulling harshly in his hair. Mycroft stands and watches Sherlock complete a few circles as though the disaster he created is somehow making this worse for him, and Mycroft knows that it is, that all of this has been too much for his brother to take in and process.

He deposits the tray on the dresser and then shuts the door behind him, before he approaches Sherlock. The boy doesn’t answer to his name, hardly even acknowledges Mycroft’s presence there until Mycroft has his arms wrapped tightly around his small body, pulling Sherlock fully into his lap as he takes a seat on the bed.

“C’mon, tootsie, you’re alright,” Mycroft says softly directly into Sherlock’s ear. 

Nobody ever hears him call Sherlock that. Their grandmother used to before she passed away, and Mycroft’s heart hurt at the thought of it being lost, so now he reserves it for Sherlock and Sherlock alone. He isn’t sure whether or not it makes a difference, but it makes him feel better nonetheless. It makes him feel closer Sherlock. 

Sherlock fights tooth and nail, literally, to wriggle free from the embrace, scratching at Mycroft’s arms and even biting him once, but Mycroft will gladly suffer the superficial injuries for his little brother’s sake, because he knows he doesn’t mean to cause harm. A few long moments pass where Mycroft hugs Sherlock snuggly against his body in a way that looks to be almost too tight, but as the seconds tick on, Sherlock begins to relax, the fight draining from his limbs as his sobs dwindle into sniffles and the occasional hiccup.

Mycroft only moves to sit back against the wall, cradling Sherlock against him as he tucks his head under his big brother’s chin. Mycroft is Sherlock’s favorite person, he thinks, because Mycroft never yells and never hurts him. 

“What was all that about, hm?” Mycroft asks Sherlock softly, not really expecting any sort of reply. “You have to be well behaved, Sherlock. It upsets Mummy.”

Mycroft holds his left hand palm up out in front of Sherlock and waits patiently until Sherlock places the three middle fingers of his right hand on his brother’s, creating the letter ‘M’. 

“M is for what, tootsie? M is for… Mummy? Mycroft? Monday? Mashed potatoes? You love those.”

_Calm down and redirect_. That’s what the books Sherlock’s therapists left behind for them say, and Mycroft has read them front to back many times. He pays attention during the sessions and tries to learn anything he can, because he sees better than their parents just how capable Sherlock is. He just needs direction and reassurance. Secretly, Mycroft likes that he’s the one teaching his little brother. For all their parents believe that Mycroft doesn’t know what he’s doing and can’t possibly be helping Sherlock, he knows without a shadow of a doubt that he can and will do this. 

He’s taught Sherlock the entire sign language alphabet and with some support, Sherlock can fingerspell some simple words. He knows he’s won that battle when next Sherlock holds out his left hand, all fingers curled in except for his pinky finger. Mycroft completes the letter ‘S’ by hooking the pinky finger of his right hand around his brother’s with a sly grin.

“What’s ‘S’ for? Is it for… cat?” he asks, jostling Sherlock a bit. The movement earns him a giggle against his chest. “No? Is it for… bird? Not bird either? Wow. I’m not sure what it’s for then!” Sherlock pats the center of his own chest with his open right hand and smiles up at Mycroft. “Is ‘S’ for Sherlock? You’re a smart cookie, tootsie. You know that? Soon, you’ll be smarter than even me.”

Sherlock makes the sign for ‘book’, opening and closing his small hands repeatedly and Mycroft shakes his head with a small smile, because this was the first word he ever taught Sherlock. It’s something they can both enjoy together, where their differences and their realities could be forgotten for just a bit. Mycroft doesn’t read to Sherlock from those boring children’s books with too bright pictures and appallingly dull plots. No, he reads from books about science and history, and sometimes when they need a change of scenery, he picks a classic like A Christmas Carol or The Jungle Book. It doesn’t make sense to Mycroft to keep Sherlock bound forever in the world of toddler toys. 

“I’ll read to you as soon as you eat your sandwich and take your medicine,” Mycroft tells him, reaching for the tray and setting it in front of them on Sherlock’s bed. 

It’s going to be a struggle; he knows it will be, because Sherlock’s already beginning to fuss, but Mycroft is no stranger to this scenario. Sherlock has always been a frightfully fussy eater, but he has tricks up his sleeves that even their parents don’t know about. He never says anything, because he knows they wouldn’t approve. They would find it stupid and tedious, but if it works, Mycroft doesn’t see what can be wrong about it.

“Hey now, none of that, alright?” He hugs Sherlock tightly again and picks up the small sandwich. “Let’s take our medicine before, so your nose will stop hurting.”

Mycroft barely manages to subdue another tantrum by taking some of the Tylenol before Sherlock does, and it’s really no wonder why Sherlock put up such a fight. The stuff tastes horrible, but he gets it down his brother’s throat eventually and by that point, Sherlock is so eager to get the taste out of his mouth he takes a big bite of his sandwich without any prompting whatsoever. The praise falls easily from Mycroft’s lips and it’s hard not to be proud when Sherlock looks up at him, beaming because he understands he’s doing something that pleases the most important person in his life.

They have a harder time with the milk, but Mycroft strikes a deal with Sherlock that for every sip Sherlock takes, Mycroft will match, and they get through their cups of milk quickly with laughter at their matching milk mustaches. 

Sherlock makes the letter ‘M’ with his own hands this time, tapping the three middle fingers of his right hand repeatedly against his left palm excitedly.

“M is for milk! That’s right, Sherlock. Smartest cookie there is.”

After Mycroft relocates the tray back to the dresser and has grabbed the appropriate book, they settle back down, Mycroft sitting up against the headboard with Sherlock curled up in a ball in his lap. Mycroft holds the book open with one hand, the other gently holding the frozen vegetables against his brother’s cheek to soothe the ache there even more. Sherlock’s heavy blanket is draped over the both of them and they’re both content with the closeness and the safety they feel in the little nest they’ve built as though they were delicate little bone-birds themselves. 

They only get a few pages in before Sherlock rests his head down on Mycroft’s shoulder and closes his eyes. He’s asleep not long after that, but Mycroft keeps reading for a bit until his mind begins to wander and he closes the book and carefully sets it aside. He thinks for a moment that he’s very lucky to have a brother like Sherlock, because at eleven years old, he already knows that differences are okay, that not everything comes wrapped up in neat little packages, that sometimes perfection comes in the form of a small for his age four year old that has so much curiosity and kindness in his heart. It makes no difference that Sherlock doesn’t always know what to do with it all, because Mycroft is confident that his brother will get there eventually. 

When Sherlock snuffles against his neck in his sleep, Mycroft looks down at the messy dark hair with a smile, pressing a soft kiss in amongst the curls as he crosses his hands against Sherlock’s back to signify three little words that he’s sure neither of them hear often enough, but that doesn’t mean he means them any less.


	2. Barbed Wire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Language plays a large part in their lives, sometimes more so the idea of it rather than the actual execution of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please pay attention to the tags.
> 
> I have a [tumblr](http://nauticus.tumblr.com/) now that I post about writing and other fandom-y things, if you lovely readers wanted to check the progress of this story!
> 
> Unbetaed.

Language plays a large part in their lives, sometimes more so the idea of it rather than the actual execution of it.

When Sherlock is five years old, he says his first full word in front of the therapists and his mother and father. He says ‘ _bloody_ ’ in such a way that nobody is quite sure whether or not it’s meant as a swear word, and in the end, they find it doesn’t matter. The praise is instant and long lasting, and Sherlock positively beams under all of the attention, giggling like a wild thing when his father scoops him up and flies him around the room. 

Mycroft learns of his brother’s first word through a phone call in the middle of English composition one day, and when Sherlock is put on the phone he says ‘ _hullo My_ ’.

Sherlock’s first word doesn’t make another appearance in his growing vocabulary again for a few years yet, but several serious conversations between his mother and father happen anyway about what is considered appropriate language to use around Sherlock, because he must have picked up the word _somewhere_. For a while, Mycroft thinks it would be amusing to teach Sherlock some of the other bad words they’re not suppose to say, but thinks better of it almost instantly at the amount of trouble they would get into.

There’s also the realization that if Sherlock is learning how to use his words now, then there must be hope for him. They are quite sure that they’re not the only parents with an autistic child that thinks the worst, and while a part of them is ashamed, a bigger part is happier in knowing that they can toss the reading material and brochures away that dealt with possible solutions for Sherlock’s future. After all, they aren’t going to be around forever. 

Mycroft found the brochures once and didn’t understand why their parents were already looking into a permanent place to put Sherlock, and he had told them in no uncertain terms that he was going to take care of his brother, even if he was only eleven years old at the time.

Above all else, what follows for Sherlock is a period of intense exploration of this new world brought to him by the slow mastering of language. He’s found his words and is slowly beginning to understand how to use them to get what he wants. It doesn’t mean the meltdowns and tantrums are any less frequent, but he feels a lot less frustrated when he can verbalize his thoughts and needs. He’s able to tell people what’s wrong when he feels outside of himself or when everything is too much, and with that, he’s able to receive the comfort and the distractions he needs to be balanced.

He spends a lot of time repeating what others around him are saying to the best of his ability, toddling around after his father and hanging onto his belt loop, repeating words and phrases he hears his father speak into the phone. Sometimes, when he’s allowed outside with Mycroft he holds his brother’s hand and alternates between repeatedly asking what’s for supper and quietly whispering the answer Mycroft gives him.

It’s a compulsion, one he can’t always control to say random bits and pieces from whatever is being said around him. He likes the way words _feel_ the most. He likes how some words feel prickly and some feel smooth and how others even feel slimy or sticky, and when Sherlock tries to explain this in a mixture of words and signs, nobody understands and he hasn’t found a way to remedy that yet. Most just nod and say they get it, but Sherlock knows they don’t. 

He isn’t too young that he doesn’t pick up on the way most adults try to humor him without even listening to what he has to say. They were so eager to hear him speak and now that he can, Sherlock is finding that they don’t care to listen.

Mycroft always has time to listen to Sherlock though, and being the most important person in his life, Sherlock has a lot to say to him. Sometimes they use their hands and their well-practiced signs. It’s comforting and when Sherlock is feeling overwhelmed, he finds it easier to communicate via sign language. 

The therapists and their parents try their best to talk Sherlock out of it. He has words to say out loud now, why should he still use his signs? It doesn’t make sense to them, but to Sherlock, it’s clear as day. The repetitive motions of his hands and fingers as they form the thoughts in his head are soothing and familiar, and if he’s having a particularly troubling day, Mycroft might show up and hold his left palm out for Sherlock to complete the letter ‘M’, and then things seem a bit clearer than before.

The nights when Mycroft reads to him have become a joint effort the more Sherlock learns, and Mycroft is surprised when Sherlock starts reading out loud with him. He knows that Sherlock can’t comprehend the meaning of most of the things he’s reading, but he recognizes sounds and how they join and meld together to form sounds into words and words into sentences. He gives Sherlock his dictionary one day before he returns to school and the boy is over the moon.

* * *

Sherlock comes out of his shell a bit more as time passes and he’s as rambunctious as ever before, constantly on the go with a mind going full speed what feels like all the time. He can’t find a way to make it go quiet and it feels not good when he doesn’t have something to hold his attention. 

The sleep troubles he had whilst a baby haven’t yet been resolved and on the nights his parents manage to tuck him into his bed, he gets at most three hours before he’s up again without understanding that it’s four in the morning and not the proper time to play.

Those nights are always the hardest, because Mycroft isn’t there to read to him when he’s away at school, and their parents are more interested in sleeping than keeping Sherlock entertained. He has his own tutors that come to the house to teach him his lessons, but sometimes, he wishes he could go with Mycroft, because then he wouldn’t be alone and left to his own devices in the nursery. When there’s no one there to bring him back in the early hours of the morning, the moments Sherlock feels outside of himself are brutal and he copes the only way he knows how.

In the morning at the breakfast table, he’s scolded for the bite marks on his wrist that are tender to the touch, and he hasn’t the proper words to say why he does it. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to explain. There’s talk of self-harming over their meals that morning and Sherlock wants more than anything to tell them that he doesn’t want to hurt himself, not really, but when he feels like he’s going to spin apart, the pain is the only thing that allows himself to be reoriented with his body. 

At his age, Sherlock doesn’t yet understand that there are people who hurt just like him for similar reasons, but with different goals in mind.

* * *

Sherlock has always had a love of music, classical strings and piano, so it’s no surprise that when he’s offered the chance to learn how to play the violin he tackles it with enthusiasm.

What is surprising is how quickly Sherlock takes to it. His mother and father are at their wits end trying to find non-destructive things to keep their child occupied, but despite feeling like Sherlock might grow bored of this as well, they hire a tutor to come to the house every Tuesday morning with all the hope in the world that this might be something that sticks with the boy. 

Sherlock has the basics down within three months. By five months, he’s playing Bach. At eight months, the tutor is told his services would no longer be required. 

Sherlock isn’t perfect yet, but it’s clear that he’s well on his way. Music is the easiest thing to come to Sherlock, easier than any other language he’s learned thus far. The bow feels natural in his hand and the press of the strings against his fingertips is a constant reminder of what’s real. It isn’t always about the music for him, but rather the repetitiveness of playing, the swaying, the stretching, and the pressure. He’s fine with others taking pleasure from the music he creates, because he has something of his very own that isn’t in danger of being taken away. It’s something the people around him, his mother, father, the therapists, can’t take from him.

For the first time, Mycroft feels the bitter sting of jealousy towards Sherlock and all the praise and attention he’s receiving. For as long as Mycroft can remember, Sherlock has been the center of attention, but it’s only now that he realizes what a central part to nearly everything Sherlock is.

At seven years old, Sherlock is mostly fluent in three languages: spoken word, signs, and music. His mind often feels too cluttered, but he understands the first is a necessary evil. The second is dear to him because it bonds him to Mycroft and reminds him that he isn’t alone. The third is the closest thing Sherlock has ever gotten to silence and a peace of mind, and he’s not going to readily give that up.

* * *

Sherlock discovers written word soon after and there’s no going back from there. 

He only discovers how it can help him by accident, when he’s spent a difficult day being told not to stim by the therapists and his parents. He doesn’t know why they won’t let him and he feels panicked about it, because if he’s not allowed to do those things, what is he supposed to do? They’re a comfort, a security, and they’re being slowly and steadily ripped away from him. 

He shouldn’t bite his wrist, he shouldn’t pull his hair, he shouldn’t tap at his mouth, he shouldn’t rock or spin or scream, but all Sherlock hears is that he shouldn’t do the things that make him feel okay. He watches his mother twirl her hair and his father tap his foot, but nobody tells them to stop doing those things and he wonders why they’re allowed to do that. What makes those movements more okay than the things he does?

So Sherlock discovers writing and somehow manages to turn that into a security blanket for himself that he’s allowed to do around people. After all, it’s just writing, it’s not hurting anybody at all. Sometimes, it comes a nuisance when Sherlock has his notepad at the dinner table or during some other inappropriate time and is scribbling frantically instead of doing the things that are expected of him. 

He starts out writing with his left hand, but switches to his right when he’s told by his therapists that things will be easier for him that way, and for once, Sherlock doesn’t put up a fight about it, because it’s a small price to pay if they don’t take away his notepad and whatever pen or pencil he’s picked up this time.

On good days, he writes out the details he sees all around him like what the people around him are wearing, their eye and hair color, are they wearing any jewelry, and their names if he finds them out. Other times, Sherlock gets stuck on a word or phrase that he fills pages up with until he feels balanced again. 

He learns that he quite likes science after Mycroft accidentally leaves his chemistry textbook at home. He uses up half a notepad listing out the elements in different ways: alphabetically forwards and backwards, by atomic weight, and groupings. 

After a week, he’s able to recite the elements by memory. Only Mycroft seems to understand that this is something important for Sherlock, and that Sherlock is more than capable of understanding these things. This isn’t just a phase or something that Sherlock is stuck on without any comprehension.

He loves numbers and science for their definable nature. They can be proven time and time again. They can be exact and they have boundaries. Numbers create boundaries. Science pushes boundaries and creates new ones and Sherlock is fascinated. Sometimes, when Mycroft comes home for a visit, he gives Sherlock another textbook he’s managed to sneak out of his school. He has quite a growing collection that he keeps under his bed to hide from their parents, because he doesn’t like when they talk to him like he’s a baby when he prattles on and on about isotopes and atoms. 

He’s old enough now to understand that despite his best efforts, he still has some sort of dark cloud hanging over his head, and it’s the only thing people see when he’s around.

* * *

Sherlock isn’t sure what he’s most excited about. He hasn’t seen Mycroft in a long time for some reason or another that he can’t remember, so when the weather finally starts to look nice again, his parents decide to surprise both their boys by scheduling a visit to Mycroft’s school. Sherlock hears details like a spring recital of some sort, but he’s too excited about the prospect of seeing where his older brother spends most of the year, not to mention all the things that he wants to tell Mycroft. He even has a list in his notebook so he doesn’t forget anything important.

In that moment though, Sherlock is on a train for the first time in his life (that he actually remembers), and there are so many fantastic things to absorb and take in, so many people to observe and details to account for. He wonders idly as he presses his face to the cool glass of the window what speed they are traveling at and what sorts of things are making the train run so smoothly. He thinks about the older woman sharing their compartment too, wondering if she has family, if she has grandchildren his age and if they like science too.

Before too long, his thoughts carry him away and before anybody notices, he’s perched in the seat next to the woman, looking up at her with his big, pale eyes as though he were scanning her for information. The corners of her eyes are wrinkled and there’s a smudge of her eye shadow there thanks to what Sherlock thinks might have been a shaking hand. Her mouth is downturned in a frown. Her clothes are old, her hat even older, but her hands look soft as though she uses lotion on them each night before bed. Sherlock thinks she must do.

“You look sad, do you have a family?” he blurts out, tapping his small fingers against the corner of his mouth. The woman glances down at him in surprise, but says nothing, and Sherlock takes that as his cue to continue on before she can. “Sometimes I’m sad too. I’m seeing my brother today. His name is My. I’m happy about that, but you look sad. My name is Sherlock. Do you want to shake my hand? My father says that’s what you do when you meet people. Are you sad because your family isn’t here with you? Is that where you are going today?”

“Sherlock! Come away from there. _Now_ ,” his mother says, pulling him off the bench seat. “I apologize. My son, he… he doesn’t always understand, you see.”

Sherlock is tugged out of the compartment and into the walkway before he can explain further that he understands perfectly fine what he was doing. 

“I was making a friend,” he says defiantly, shifting his weight from foot to foot. 

He doesn’t like the look in his mother’s eyes, so he keeps his own focused on the necklace she’s wearing. It’s new, father must have given it to her, but for what reason, he’s not entirely sure.

“No. You weren’t. You were bothering that poor woman. How many times, Sherlock, do we have to tell you? No, you take your hand away from your mouth while I’m speaking to you. You do not approach people like that Sherlock. Not everybody wants to talk to you. Not all of them understand.”

Everything seems to be built on this ‘understanding’ his parents place such importance on. Either he doesn’t understand or everybody else around him doesn’t understand, but what Sherlock can’t seem to figure out is what exactly they’re all meant to be understanding in the first place. He’s never had the courage to pose this question out loud, because he thinks that it’s not something he’s supposed to talk about.

After another reminder that he’s not to stim, Sherlock is ushered back into the compartment that’s now devoid of the old woman’s presence, and for a moment, Sherlock is devastated that she didn’t want to be his friend. Maybe his mother was right after all. The old woman didn’t understand and neither did Sherlock, and that seems to be where their similarities ended. 

He slides back onto the seat next to his father and takes out his notepad and his pen and begins scribbling down the things he remembers about the old woman. It’s not really relevant information anymore, but it keeps him from thinking too hard about uncomfortable things. Thinking about why she looked so unhappy keeps Sherlock from wondering why he feels the same for a little while. But soon, his mind takes a turn towards thinking of how his own sadness feels like a round, dark pit sitting right in the center of his chest. It feels like barbed wire, sharp and shiny, and so frustrating that at some point, Sherlock is pulled into his father’s lap and held onto tightly until he feels right side up again.

It’s all a bit of a blur after that, the station and the following ride to Mycroft’s school, and as the campus looms ahead of them, Sherlock is back to bouncing in his seat in excitement. He’s rambling a mile a minute about all the things he wants to tell Mycroft and when the car pulls to a stop, Sherlock is the first one out. He remembers that he needs to stop and wait for his parents and not go rushing ahead, because he could be hurt, but he wishes more than anything that they would hurry up. 

There are children and families mingling on the front lawns, but Sherlock is trying to block them out and pick Mycroft out from the crowds. He doesn’t spot him and is only mildly disappointed until Mycroft pops up to their left with a wide grin on his face. 

They don’t visit often, so Mycroft doesn’t see his family as much as some of the other boys, but when he thinks about it, at sixteen, he knows he’s too old to worry about those things. Besides, each time he goes home for the holidays, it’s becoming more and more apparent that not all is right and okay. He thinks he didn’t notice it before because he was younger, but he sees now that their parents are fighting more and more often about everything and anything under the sun, and quite honestly, Mycroft enjoys the peace and quiet he gets at school. Holidays with family is plenty enough for him. 

He isn’t sure what to make of the idea of having his family on school grounds either. The potential for embarrassment is high, practically soaring over the rooftops. What with their parents’ pension for bickering constantly and Sherlock’s _issues_ , Mycroft is fully expecting to come away from the visit with no friends and a terrible reputation as the boy with the dysfunctional family.

“My!” Sherlock says before he launches himself at his brother. He doesn’t see the way Mycroft glances over his shoulder before he wraps his arms around Sherlock as well.

“Hello tootsie,” he replies, patting Sherlock’s back affectionately. “Did you take the train? I told you it was exciting.”

As Mycroft straightens back up and greets their parents, Sherlock grabs Mycroft’s hand and launches into his story about the woman on the train. Nobody’s paying him much attention, but he talks anyway, wondering out loud the questions that had plagued him about her on the ride there, but he trails off when Mycroft hurriedly pulls his hand away from Sherlock’s and stuffs them both in his trouser pockets.

Two boys are headed in their direction that Sherlock doesn’t recognize, but they seem to recognize his brother and he figures out that these must be the friends Mycroft talks about. From the descriptions Mycroft has given them, Sherlock knows that the tall boy with cropped blond hair and brown eyes is Peter and his short friend with dark hair and green eyes is Will. He wonders if they’ll be his friends too, but he doesn’t get to ask about that, because Mycroft is hurrying away again, their mother and father promising to catch up properly at the luncheon. 

Sherlock watches as Mycroft tries to herd the boys in the opposite direction like he’s embarrassed about something, but he can’t think of anything for Mycroft to be embarrassed about.

After much begging and promising to behave himself, Sherlock convinces their parents to let him tag along with Mycroft and whatever it was that he and his friends are doing. Sherlock’s so excited he practically skips across the green, notepad in hand. When he catches up, the boys are standing in a semicircle discussing somebody’s female cousin using some words and phrases that Sherlock knows for a fact are not good. If their mother and father found out that Mycroft was saying these things, he would be in so much trouble, but Sherlock decides to keep this secret of Mycroft’s, because Mycroft has kept plenty of Sherlock’s.

It’s second nature to latch onto his brother’s hand, so Sherlock thinks nothing of it as he skids to a halt with a smile on his face, his hand slipping into Mycroft’s before the older boys even have a chance to process that they have a small tagalong now.

“Mother said I could come with you,” he announces to them all proudly, like he’s somehow part of their group. He knows he’s not really old enough, but thinks that maybe he can come away from this with some new friends like Mycroft.

Groaning, Mycroft flushes in embarrassment as a wave of snickers make their way around the semicircle. Sherlock laughs too, though he doesn’t know what’s funny, but he knows he doesn’t want to be the odd one out, so if the others are laughing, he wouldn’t look out of place if he joins them.

“Sherlock, God, don’t be such a baby,” Mycroft snaps, yanking his hand away from Sherlock’s as though he had been burnt.

“I am _not_ a baby. I am nine years old,” Sherlock counters with the only thing that comes to mind that’s not questioning why Mycroft won’t hold his hand like he usually does. 

It’s not much of an argument either and everybody knows it except for Sherlock. He has his wrist halfway to his mouth before Mycroft sighs and quietly tells him not to do that as Peter and Will look on in amusement.

Peter looks Sherlock up and down before he glances back at Mycroft. “You never said you had a brother. Is he retarded or something?”

“Some sort of family secret, hey?” Will laughs.

Mycroft is completely torn about what he should do in that moment. Sherlock is looking at him for clarification just as he always has, but Peter and Will are looking at him as though they were sizing him up again, deciding if Mycroft is still enough to belong in their group, and Mycroft wants nothing more than to be in that group. He’s worked long and hard to build his reputation at school over the years, and now it’s finally paying off. He has friends and he _fits_ somewhere. Surely Sherlock will understand?

“He’s… autistic,” Mycroft answers slowly, sidling away from Sherlock as subtly as he can manage.

Mycroft doesn’t agree with Peter’s assessment, but neither does he disagree, and little do the brothers know that this is the moment when things change irreparably between them.

Sherlock looks at a point near Mycroft’s shoulder, suddenly not sure of his place. “My?”

“Just... Just go back to Mummy and Father, alright? I’ll see you later. Go, Sherlock.”

Sherlock does what he’s told only because Mycroft and his friends have stalked off further along the lawn, tucking themselves away into the shadow of a building. Sherlock doesn’t see the way Mycroft looks back over his shoulder at him as he wanders in the direction he came from and Mycroft doesn’t see how the barbed wire sadness has now found a place on Sherlock’s boyish features; sharp and piercing in a way it never has been before.

He’s nervous as he wanders through the throng of people, but he knows he can’t bite his wrist or pull his hair or rock or scream, so he writes. He scribbles the word ‘retarded’ over and over until he’s gone through three pages front and back, and he doesn’t stop until his mother sits him on the grass at her feet.

A few Christmases ago, Mycroft had taken Sherlock into the village by their home to look for gifts for their parents. Sherlock had never been so excited, because he hardly got see outside of the grounds. The ground was dusted in a thick layer of fluffy white snow and they made snow angels, and Sherlock remembers having never laughed so hard in his life as Mycroft taught him how to make a proper snowball. Sherlock had spectacular aim and had gotten enough snow down Mycroft’s collar that they had to run to the shops before he froze.

The shops had been full of what felt like every person in England, pushing and shoving to get that last minute gift, closing in on Sherlock from all sides. Neither of them realized their mistake in going until Sherlock was stuck in the middle of the crowd having a meltdown because of the onslaught of information was overloading his senses. He had covered his ears and started whimpering, and the next thing he had known, Mycroft had him outside again in the open, hands upon his shoulders, reassuring Sherlock that everything was okay.

Two boys who had seen it all had come out to poke fun. Sherlock purposefully forgot their faces, but he remembers the things they called him. He remembers even stronger the way Mycroft had stood up for him that day. On the way home, Mycroft had held his hand tightly and told Sherlock to ignore what the boys had said, that there was nothing at all wrong with him. He thought differently and acted strangely sometimes, yes, but that didn’t mean that he was wrong.

It had happened so gradually that Sherlock couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment it occurred, but Mycroft had changed.

Sherlock spends the rest of the afternoon in silence, refusing to speak out loud and only using his signs. He doesn’t speak up again until three days go by and his parents won’t let him touch his violin unless he says ‘please’.

* * *

When Mycroft is home next, Sherlock has nearly forgotten the way Mycroft made him feel that day at his school. He’s very forgiving when it comes to his brother, but it’s hard when Mycroft still seems to be distancing himself from Sherlock. Sherlock tries everything, but Mycroft doesn’t even complete their signed letters anymore and Sherlock doesn’t understand what this new feeling of being heartbroken means just yet, but he keeps trying, because his brother is the most important person in his world.

That night, dinner turns into another argument between mother and father and everybody goes off in their own separate directions. Sherlock waits until their parents are in their room before he leaves the nursery and goes to Mycroft’s room, carrying a heavy book in his arms that he hopes to get Mycroft to read to him from. 

It’s been many months since Mycroft has done that, and Sherlock remembers that they used to do this any time there was a fight in the house. The fights occur much more often now than before, and Sherlock thinks that if they read every time that they would run out of books before their parents ran out of things to fight about.

He lets himself into Mycroft’s room and shuts the door behind him. Mycroft is sitting at his desk with the lamp on, finishing up some school work that is due upon his return in a week’s time, and Sherlock wastes no time in scurrying over to peer around Mycroft’s shoulder to see what he’s writing. Sherlock notices first how smoothly the pen he’s using moves over the paper and makes a note to try it out for himself later, but for now, he holds his left hand out in front of Mycroft in the hopes that he’s not turned away again.

“What do you want, Sherlock? I’m busy,” Mycroft says, but he places the three middle fingers of his right hand onto Sherlock’s left palm by way of a much kinder and familiar greeting.

There’s no reply for a long while as Sherlock continues to focus on his brother’s writing and the work he’s doing until his mind begins to wander to other things. They haven’t really spoken since that day they visited Mycroft and school, and if they had, it had only been to say hello briefly. There were a lot of things to catch up on, but there is also a nagging thought in the back of Sherlock’s busy mind that has been bothering him with increasing frequency lately, and he can’t think of a better person to ask than his older brother.

“Am I retarded, Mycroft?” he asks as he organizes a pile of paperclips into a straight line.

Mycroft pauses in his writings to glance over at his brother. The expression on Sherlock’s face isn’t one of concern, or hurt, or confusion, but one of somebody who has perhaps just asked something mundane like the time of day.

“What? Why would you…”

“Is it bad? If I am does that mean I’m bad? People say it to me sometimes and they don’t look like they like me when they do, but I haven’t done anything to them. Mummy says they don’t understand and that I don’t understand either.”

“Can you not touch my things, Sherlock, please,” Mycroft says instead. 

He can’t think about, let alone answer Sherlock’s questions without feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt that he may have contributed somehow to Sherlock suddenly wondering whether or not there was something wrong with him. He thinks _calm down and redirect_ instead will get him off the hook, and it does quite well when Sherlock seems to forget he asked the question in the first place. Mycroft knows that’s not quite true, but he’s at least avoided it for now.

As Sherlock crawls up onto his bed and opens the book he brought in his lap, Mycroft stares at him as though it’s the first time he’s ever seen him. The boy is thin is a rail with messy dark hair and bruises and teeth marks on his arms from his own doing. He remembers when Sherlock was a baby, before his diagnosis when he was simply excited to have a brother to play with. Even at seven, Mycroft had crafted grand fantasies about the sorts of games that he could play with Sherlock.

Sometimes, he wonders guiltily if Sherlock would have been better off not being born at all if he couldn’t be normal. There is a fragile quality about Sherlock, about the way he views the world, and one day, it’s going to shatter Sherlock into a million pieces, but Mycroft hasn’t the heart to tell him so.


	3. Poplars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lot of things begin with Sherlock Holmes, but quite a few more end with him, his parents’ marriage being the most noteworthy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please pay attention to the tags.
> 
> I have a [tumblr](http://nauticus.tumblr.com/) now that I post about writing and other fandom-y things, if you lovely readers wanted to check the progress of this story!
> 
> Unbetaed.

A lot of things begin with Sherlock Holmes, but quite a few more end with him, his parents’ marriage being the most noteworthy. 

It isn’t anything new, the fighting, and for as long as Sherlock can remember, his mother and father had been at one another’s throats over things of varying degrees of importance. 

At six, Sherlock learns that saying he doesn’t like the applesauce that’s been bought especially for him can make for a spectacular weeklong dispute, where father sleeps in his study because mother has locked him out of the bedroom. At nine, he realizes the times he goes offline and reverts back to his signs is a great bone of contention, resulting in doors slamming. At eleven, he learns the hard way that just because he _thinks_ it doesn’t mean he should _say_ it.

It starts out with small things. Sherlock notices a smudge of makeup under his mother’s left eye and determines she must have been crying. He says this out loud over supper one night and is told not to meddle. One day he notices a dark purple bruise on Mycroft’s neck, barely hidden by his shirt collar, and when Mycroft unbuttons it because of the heat, Sherlock can’t help but ask the girl’s name. This time, Mycroft is shouted at, and afterwards ignores Sherlock for the rest of his visit. On a Wednesday morning, he notices one of the kitchen staff has flour on the back of her skirt. Normally, this would mean nothing of significance, and it doesn’t until Sherlock sees the gardener with flour on his elbows. He isn’t sure what it is they’ve done, but when he tells his mother about it, she seems upset and Sherlock doesn’t see the girl or the gardener again.

Sherlock’s observations increase in relevance with practice, and it doesn’t take long before he is able to tell a person what they had for breakfast, what they most likely would be having for lunch, and from the stress lines on their face, he can see that there’s trouble not only on the home front, but also at work. His mother’s friend didn’t appreciate Sherlock’s advice to return the money he stole to his boss, and all Sherlock can think is what a terrible liar the man is. 

Being the only people that Sherlock is close to, his family is not immune to Sherlock’s little deductions. In fact, they get the brunt of them as Sherlock has yet to understand that not everybody wants to hear these truths. It’s not really his fault. He’s been taught that truthfulness is a good thing, and so he tries to be whenever he possibly can. He’s just unaware that he needs to develop a filter, because sometimes the truth hurts more than lies ever could.

He catches his father in a lie in the middle of July. 

For a long while afterwards, all Sherlock can remember are the details as he purposefully makes himself forget the feelings. The grass is dry and crunchy underfoot and his nose is peeling from the sunburn he got while exploring the grounds again without proper protection. His shirt is over starched and he spends the day tugging and pulling at the collar of it uncomfortably. The heat makes his stomach hurt, so he doesn’t eat and only drinks ice water when his mother sets a glass down in front of him expectantly.

It cools down in the evening and while Mycroft and their mother are outside, Sherlock roams around the hallways inside, dragging his left hand on the wall, short blunt nails catching on the paper. His father’s voice catches his attention as he passes by his study, and Sherlock pauses for a moment, knowing that he’s not supposed to interrupt when his parents are on the phone, and this sounds like an important conversation.

“Charlotte, please, you know I can’t leave early,” his father says. Sherlock can’t place the tone and can’t infer just yet what the conversation must be about. “Of course I’d rather be there, you know that. Hold on a moment, love.”

Sherlock backs away down the hall again and tucks himself into an alcove as his father pokes his head out the door and looks both ways. He doesn’t shut the door all the way when he retreats back into the study and Sherlock sneaks back towards it once the coast is clear. His interest has definitely been caught by what is so clearly meant to be a secret, and Sherlock loves those. Secrets mean puzzles and puzzles mean mysteries that need to be solved.

“Do you have it?” he hears his father say. “Are you wearing it then? I can think of nothing else but you in that shirt, love. There I was thinking I’d lost it, only to find you had taken it. Shit, I have to go. Yes, yes. Thursday at eight. I’ll see you then.”

Mycroft and their mother come back inside and during a rare family moment, they all find themselves in the sitting room, and Sherlock honestly can’t remember when the last time this had happened was. He’s so used to everybody being off in their own separate corners of the house that to see his mother and father sitting on the sofa together is something that confuses him greatly for a moment. It passes though, because his mind is focused solely on his new puzzle he’s discovered and as he crawls into the chair next to his brother that’s really too small for the both of them, he grins, because he knows something nobody else does.

He reads over Mycroft’s shoulder for a little while until he’s practically vibrating with his secret. 

“Who is Charlotte?”

In his still limited knowledge of the universe, Sherlock knows it’s not actually possible for time to stop or for the Earth to stop spinning on its axis, but in that moment, he’s fairly sure that that’s exactly what happens the second the words leave his mouth. The expression on his father’s face is hard to read; yet Sherlock knows it’s not a good look, far from it. Mycroft and their mother look up curiously, both sets of eyes darting between Sherlock and the Holmes patriarch.

“I heard Father talking to Charlotte on the phone. In his study. He called her love. He never says that to any of us. Is Charlotte family? I thought she might be an aunt, but we don’t have an aunt called Charlotte, do we My?” 

All eyes are on Sherlock and he’s indifferent towards the attention, because now that he thinks through things, the oddity of the entire situation becomes glaringly obvious. 

“Oh.”

It suddenly makes sense. All the clues are starting to form a cohesive map in Sherlock’s busy mind. He has to clear some space for it, but it’s definitely there, unfurling the more he processes. He knows of no Charlotte, family or acquaintance, and he thinks that Charlotte must be close to his father for him to call her love when he does no such thing to his family. The tone of voice his father used on the phone fits into the picture as being one of apprehension, tension, and desire. Sherlock realizes that his father didn’t want to be caught talking to Charlotte, which sets off alarm bells in his mind.

“Why does she have your shirt?” he asks, looking across at his father skeptically. He wants to be proven wrong about this and his naivety allows him to think that he just might be. “Is it the red one you told Mummy you lost on your trip? If you lost it, why is Charlotte wearing it?”

“Enough!” his father shouts, no standing in the center of the room with the startled faces of his family looking at him.

It’s silent, eerily so, for a few long moments before their mother gets to her feet as well, looking for all the world like she might burst into tears and Sherlock hopes it’s not because of something that he’s done, because he hates it when Mummy is upset.

“Go to your rooms, boys,” she whispers. “Now. Go.”

Mycroft shoves Sherlock from the chair and grabs his wrist, pulling him from the room. Sherlock looks back over his shoulder as sees his father with his hands over his face and his mother’s shoulders shaking with what must be the tears he saw in her eyes. He wants to ask Mycroft what’s going on, but Mycroft just pushes him into the room and shuts the door before he has the chance. He debates with himself about whether or not he should follow, or maybe go to their parents, but he just pats his door and turns away, wrist already at his mouth as he nips at the tender skin there.

He half expects their mother to come to him in the night, to tuck him in or even explain some things to him, but she doesn’t and Sherlock spends another sleepless night scribbling in his notebook. He can hear the shouting from all the way across the house over the scritch-scratching of pen across paper, and he knows that this is one of the bad fights that mean his father will be sleeping in his study until the issue is resolved.

It’s late when Sherlock decides to venture out of his room. It could technically be considered early, he knows, depending on who’s asking, but Sherlock’s concept of time runs independent of anybody else’s, and either way, it makes no difference at all to him if the clocks say three in the afternoon or three in the morning. As such, it’s three thirty-four in the morning when Sherlock decides to investigate, because he can still hear the shouting and the anger behind the muffled words.

As he draws nearer to his parents’ bedroom he hears, “I can’t take this any more, Lydia! I want simplicity. For God’s sakes, I want a family that doesn’t revolve around one member.”

“Don’t you dare bring your boy into this, Siger. I won’t stand for it. I won’t.”

“How can I not? Explain that one to me, will you? I haven’t had a day off since the day he was born.”

“That’s what happens when you have children! Do you honestly think I planned for him to be this way? I look at Mycroft and I think well at least we can be proud of what he’s accomplished. I can look the other way with Sherlock. He may not be what you asked for, but he is what you have. Is that not enough? Is Sherlock really such a problem for you that you feel the need to…”

“Lydia, please.”

“After everything, Siger, this is what it comes down to? You off with another woman and me swept to the side with the children? Do you love her?”

There’s a pause that lasts for moments too long and then, “Yes. Yes to it all. _Yes_.”

With the silence that follows, Sherlock thinks that perhaps the argument has been settled, but then there comes a sharp crack and a startled gasp from his father. Sherlock flinches, because though it’s not the first time his mother has slapped his father, this is the first time Sherlock has been legitimately frightened by it, especially following the confusing conversation he’s overheard.

He goes to the only place he feels safe in the entire house. He doesn’t knock and never has needed to before and when he shuts the door quietly behind him, Sherlock sees Mycroft at his desk again, nursing a half empty bottle of red wine he must have taken from the kitchen.

“Mummy will be angry,” Sherlock says needlessly. 

He’s caught his brother with wine quite a few times in his adolescence, but Mycroft never lets him have any. He still keeps the secret though, because he knows it makes his brother happy. Most of the time, Mycroft drinks because he’s in a good mood, or he wants to feel rebellious against his strict upbringing, but Sherlock can tell this moment is neither of those, and is something entirely different. It feels menacing and unpleasant.

Mycroft says nothing at first, just takes another angry gulp from the bottle as he watches Sherlock go to his bookcase and fiddle with the books there. He watches him move a few titles around interspersed with bites to his arm, and the more Mycroft sees, the angrier he becomes. Sherlock looks so entirely innocent standing in front of the shelf with his lopsided shorts and his shirt with the collar so stretched out it’s hanging off his right shoulder. It’s not fair that Sherlock has his innocence still, that he doesn’t fully understand anything around him at all. Mycroft finds himself wishing he could be that oblivious.

These feelings have been steadily brewing over the past few years as Mycroft grows up and realizes his life isn’t a perfect fairy tale. In fact, it’s the exact opposite and though he’s eighteen and a university student, it doesn’t mean that he’s above petty feelings and the need to place the blame for their deteriorating home life on somebody. Sherlock is an easy target.

“We don’t have an aunt called Charlotte, right? Right My? I was right when I said that, I know I was. They’re fighting again, but you can hear it. When you’re at school, they fight a lot too. About lots of things. Sometimes I don’t think they even know what they’re fighting about, but they just do it so it’s not so quiet around here, because it gets really quiet here. I can hear the house creaking at night. Remember when I thought it was monsters? But it wasn’t monsters, because they don’t exist. Mummy and Father are proud of you. They said so. I heard them say it. They say it-“

“Shut up! Jesus Christ, Sherlock, just _shut up_.”

In all his life, as far as he can remember, Sherlock has never heard Mycroft speak to him like this. He’s never yelled at him or told him to shut up. He’s always been the one encouraging Sherlock to speak about whatever it is that he fancies, no matter the topic. Mycroft has always encouraged Sherlock to ask questions, to be curious, to learn, and he’s always been there when their parents fight. But this night is different and Sherlock can feel it in his belly, swirling around like a dark rain cloud about to unleash the fiercest storm he can possibly think of.

Sherlock’s eyes widen when Mycroft tugs him away from his shelf, muttering about how sick and tired he is of Sherlock never listening to him when he says not to touch his things. Mycroft has never been rough with him before either, but he knows the tight grip his brother has on him is going to leave bruises on his upper arms.

“This is your fault. This is all your fault, you know that? Do you understand that, Sherlock? Are you capable of understanding that?” Mycroft spits.

Sherlock doesn’t say anything, but he shakes his head no, because being honest is a good thing and he honestly doesn’t understand what’s going on or how it’s his fault. The smell of the red wine on his brother’s breath is bitter and he wonders if this is what it means to be intoxicated. Sherlock knows the definition of the word, but being able to apply it to his usually steady brother is unsettling.

Mycroft is much too close to him, invading his senses, making him uneasy to the point where he’s begun shifting his weight back and forth, his bare toes curling down into the cold hardwood. He knows he’s not supposed to do it, but he can’t help the tiny sound of distress he makes, a warning sign to anybody that this is becoming far too much for him to handle, before he brings his arm up to his mouth, eyes settling on anything that isn’t his brother. He misses the sudden movement on Mycroft’s part as he slaps Sherlock’s hand away from his face with a scowl and enough force to leave red marks on Sherlock’s pale skin.

“ _This_ is why he’s leaving. If you were normal like the rest of us, he wouldn’t be leaving. But of course you don’t understand ‘cause you’re off in your own little world all the damn time. Well, I hate to break it to you, Sherlock, but you’re the one they fight about. You use your damn signs when you feel the need to act like a child. You _bite_ yourself for Christ’s sake. You won’t eat like a normal person. Applesauce? At eleven years old? Grow up!”

Somewhere deep inside himself, Mycroft knows the damage he’s causing. He knows that it’s going to be permanent and he knows he’s making a mark on Sherlock that’s not physical, but even worse than that. He knows he should stop now and apologize, take the time to explain to his little brother that changes are about to happen and that he has nothing to be sorry for, but the fact of the matter is, the God’s honest truth is that Mycroft _wants_ to hurt Sherlock.

Mycroft wants Sherlock to finally understand on some basic level that life isn’t about what’s in his head, the stupid, insignificant details like dust on the mantel or what rumpled shirt collars mean. Those details are for nothing in the grand scheme of things when their family is being torn apart at the seams all because Sherlock _doesn’t understand_.

Sherlock has curled his arms in against his chest, hands twisted up just under his chin. He’s never made Mycroft this angry before and it’s one of those worst things he’s ever experienced, but he absorbs everything his brother is telling him. His brother has never lied to him either, so he doesn’t question a thing. If Mycroft says it, it must be true, because truthfulness is good. They were taught that early on, Sherlock remembers.

“I wish you were never born. Get out.”

Mycroft has never before told such an astoundingly huge lie, but the words spill out before he can stop them. The wine has dulled his own senses, faded out his own filter, and he thinks as he watches his little brother’s face crumble and the tears spill over that he’s never been so sorry. The apologies refuse to show themselves and by the time Mycroft can figure out how to take a deep breath again, it’s too late. Sherlock has scampered out of the room and Mycroft imagines him huddling under his weighted blanket and curled around a notebook instead of a stuffed animal like a normal child.

His estimations aren’t far from the truth. As Mycroft finishes the bottle of red wine in the early hours of the morning, Sherlock spends the same hours in hysterical confusion, curled up in a ball in the center of his bed. Mycroft used to tell him that there was nothing wrong with him, that he was all right, that he was perfect the way he was, but now he’s said that Sherlock isn’t normal, is responsible for the chaos in their family, and that he wishes Sherlock had never been born.

Only one side can be the truth and Sherlock is scared to think of which side it might be.

In the morning, their parents sit the boys down in the sitting room again and explain that their father will be leaving, effective immediately. It’s for the best, they say, but Mycroft sits in his corner of the sofa glaring to cover up the way his chest aches. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Families are meant to be a unit, together and whole. He knows that’s not how things always work out, but he never thought for a moment that his family would end up broken. Sherlock sits silently in his corner, picking at a scab on his arm and only looks up when their father makes to leave.

It’s a long and painful goodbye, where Sherlock forgets he has words and clings to his father tightly, whimpering and shouting as he’s pulled away. The three of them stand in the front door way, watching as father and husband walks to the taxi waiting just outside the gate. Sherlock makes a run for it as the car pulls away, but the gate stops him and no amount of begging or pleading is bringing his father back and never will. 

While Mycroft and their mother spend the rest of the day and evening dealing with their sadness in their own ways, Sherlock sits on the ground expectantly by the gate, watching and waiting, and thinking of ways to fix the problem.

* * *

Mother decides that the last week of August before Mycroft returns to school is going to be spent in the city, but it’s hard for any of them to feel properly excited. The wound of father and husband leaving is still too fresh, but hope drives them all to believe that a little trip away to the family flat in London might make things a bit better.

It doesn’t. If anything at all is accomplished, it’s the fact that they are slowly coming to realize that the hole in their familial unit isn’t being repaired. There’s anger, more anger than any of them have ever experienced, but beneath it, there’s a naivety that surely this can’t be happening to them, of all people.

By the third day, they’re all feeling the effects of being cooped up in a flat with too few corners in which to hide away. Before things fell apart, trips to the city were exciting and adventurous, and Sherlock remembers visiting the shops and parks, or spending time in the main room with his parents and his brother playing games like Scrabble, which he was incredibly good at, nearly always beating the others. Having a dictionary attached to his hand from a young age came in handy at times, but they haven’t played any games in a long while, and no attempts to leave the flat have been made.

This time, their mother spends all her time locked up in the master suite and Mycroft sits on the sofa, angrily flipping through channels on the television, while Sherlock keeps to himself quietly at the table by the window. 

He’s reading at a college level now, and once thought that he would be able to have conversations with Mycroft about the sorts of things he was reading about, but in light of recent events, Sherlock’s discovered that he’s scared to speak to his brother. The times that he’s tried since their father left have been met with stony silence or a ‘piss off, Sherlock’. It confuses him, because Mycroft doesn’t usually use that kind of language.

Sherlock is thumbing through a biology textbook, memorizing plant cell structures (nucleolus, nucleus, nuclear membrane, cytoplasm, mitochondrion, chloroplast, ribosomes) when their mother enters the room. Her eyes are red rimmed and her nose is pink and raw. She must have used all the good tissues then. She is upset and Sherlock knows it, but he doesn’t know how to make it better. She’s never been one for embracing, and honestly, neither is Sherlock, and he feels absolutely miserable that his mother is obviously so distraught and he can’t do anything about it.

Her pale pink dressing gown is wrinkled from being wrapped around her tightly in the ball she curled herself up in and didn’t move from the entire night. Sherlock knows she didn’t move because she was in the same position earlier when he says good morning to her as she was in the previous night. He looks up ‘sadness’ and ‘depression’ in his dictionary, but the definitions aren’t helpful, because they don’t tell him what he should do.

As she slumps into an armchair in the main room, Mycroft jumps up and heads into the kitchen to fix her a cup of tea, because he thinks it’s probably the least he could do after everything. He hates seeing his mother miserable too, but at least he’s trying to do something. Realistically, he knows that Sherlock is at a loss, but it makes him feel better knowing that he’s actually being useful instead of sitting at the table and watching.

And Sherlock does watch. He sees the steam rising and swirling in the air as Mycroft brings the tea back and sets it on the side table next to their mother, and he sees the way Mycroft purposefully avoids looking in his direction. Sherlock thinks it’s most probably because Mycroft doesn’t want him there. Sherlock knows enough that he can’t take back the fact that he was born though, even if he wants to make everybody happy again.

“Take your brother out with you this afternoon,” their mother sighs as she reaches for her tea.

Sherlock closes his book and puts his cheek down against the cool wooden surface, eyes trained on Mycroft. He traces the twisting wood grains with his fingertip, over dark and light spaces. Poplar, he thinks. The table is old and there are indentations from pens, knives, and belt buckles. Too soft a wood for a table. It isn’t practical.

“Must I?”

“You must, yes. Just for a little while. I’d like some time alone this afternoon.”

“Can’t you put him in his room with a book or two? He’s… He’s too much.”

“Mycroft, you will do as I say. Take him to the shops. Let him pick something for himself.”

Mycroft wonders if he’s too old to pitch a fit and the answer is disappointingly yes, so he begrudgingly agrees, if only to do their mother a favor. Sherlock thinks that he would rather stay in the bedroom he shares with Mycroft there and read his books, but he doesn’t say so, because this might cheer their mother up after all. Maybe they’ll come home and she’ll have a smile on her face and they’ll play board games over cheese sandwiches and glasses of cold milk.

When it’s time to leave, Mycroft tells him so with a short and to the point ‘put your shoes on’, and Sherlock does as he’s told, tucking his notebook and pencil into his trouser pocket on the way out the door. 

As they walk down the crowded streets towards the park, Sherlock thinks about how he wants to hold his brother’s hand the way he used to. The physical support was always something he had sought out, but he knows he can’t do that anymore. He needs to grow up, Mycroft told him, but it’s hard to do that when his brother isn’t there to answer his questions. He’s there in person, but he’s not there emotionally, no longer available to Sherlock as a source of comfort. If this is growing up, Sherlock wants no part in it.

“Are you going to play football with your friends, My?” Sherlock asks timidly, looking up at Mycroft. He has to take two quick steps for every one of Mycroft’s long strides since his growth spurt. 

“Yes.”

“Can I play? I practice sometimes in the garden.”

“No, you cannot.”

The disappointment is evident on Sherlock’s face, but he wasn’t expecting to be allowed to play anyway. For some reason, he can’t stop trying to win Mycroft back, because he feels odd and empty without his brother being involved in all aspects of his life. It wouldn’t feel right to just let things continue on how they are without trying to turn things right side up again.

There’s a long pause and then Sherlock continues on. “Are we going to the shops like Mummy said we could? She’s sad. Can we get something for her?”

“I’m not going off gallivanting with you Sherlock. You think I like having to play babysitter? I’m only doing this for Mummy, so I expect you to sit there and not move or say anything. I don’t feel like being embarrassed today.”

Sherlock says nothing and they eventually arrive at the park, the large expanses of bright green grass stretch out and are filled will all sorts of people and things of interest. Lives are being lived all around them and it’s a fascinating thing to think about, and even if his mind is mostly full of his mother’s distress and his brother’s distance, he still extracts all possible data from the situation. He’ll never see any of these people again, but in the moment, people’s shoe sizes and problems unrelated himself are holding his interests, until Mycroft stops next to a tree and tosses his bag down.

“She blames you,” Mycroft says, and his gut twists even as the words are spoken out loud.

He can’t stop himself. He can’t stop the need to project his pain onto somebody else, because as terrible as it is, it makes him feel better. The pain lessons each time he brings his brother down a notch.

Sherlock squints at an anthill at the base of the tree and nods. “I know.” Mycroft’s unsaid ‘I blame you too’ is a given.

Apologies never seem like the right thing to say anymore, so Sherlock doesn’t. Mycroft wouldn’t accept it anyway, he knows. Despite this, he’s not angry at his brother for the way he’s treating him. There must be a great deal of pain within Mycroft, and Sherlock spends a lot of time thinking about ways to fix that too, always ignoring how each word from his brother seems to break something else off of him; another brick in the wall he doesn’t know he’s building.

The grief of their father leaving and the terrible things Mycroft says to him intertwine and become one entity in Sherlock’s mind, one that he imagines looks like a writhing and slippery dark mass that seems to have taken up residence in his belly. He can’t tell them apart and really, what does it matter, because the sadness is the same all over.

The tree branches provide shade for Sherlock to sit comfortably under, not too hot, not too cold, but he thinks about how he could be doing this back at home too. There are trees at home that he sometimes sits under, studying bark patterns and sap. Here though, in the park amongst the chatter and shouts of people having picnic lunches and boys playing football, Sherlock allows himself to be wrapped up in the colony of ants to his right. At first glance, it looks like a one large, undulating mass until he leans in for a closer look. All these individual parts making up a whole, helping each other to survive. He draws a diagram in his notebook with some notes that might come in handy later.

Occasionally, Sherlock glances up to watch the game. Mycroft stands off to the side most of the time, because he’s never been one to play sports, but any opportunity to get out and socialize with his friends is one that he is not going to pass up. Peter and Will are more serious about the game than Mycroft could ever hope to be, but they don’t seem to notice the lackluster effort of their teammate. Mycroft hasn’t told them about his parents’ divorce, because he’s embarrassed and certain that Peter and Will’s parents are still happily married. He doesn’t want to admit to being jealous, even to himself.

It doesn’t help matters that the park is full of young families, cheerful and smiling so wide Mycroft thinks their faces should be splitting. He despises them for their happiness and their unity. He despises the older brother helping his younger brother across the monkey bars, because he knows that is what he should be doing with Sherlock. But he’s not and he won’t. He can’t.

“Oy! Watch the ball, you idiot!” Peter shouts at Mycroft as the latter pays no attention.

The ball continues across the grass until it comes to a stop against Sherlock’s knee, bouncing and rolling a few feet away again. He studies it for a moment, determining the sort of shoes Peter and Will must be wearing based on the scuff marks on the ball. It’s a fairly new ball, freshly pumped up, limited amount of grass stains, just a few black marks from the soles of somebody’s shoes. Peter jogs over as Sherlock gets to his feet and picks the ball up, weighing it in his hands. It needs more air in it, he decides.

“Hey Rain Man, give us the ball, yeah?” Peter asks loudly, garnering a few glances from onlookers.

Sherlock looks at him quizzically. “My name is Sherlock.”

“Good for you. The ball.”

Sherlock holds the ball out for Peter to take, looking at the grass between them as he does so. He’s forgotten how he once thought Mycroft’s friends would be his friends too, but even so, he doesn’t think he wants to be their friend anyway. They don’t even know his proper name.

The game resumes, but Sherlock doesn’t sit down again. One look around him and suddenly things are just a bit too bright, too loud, too everything at once, and he realizes he doesn’t want to be there anymore. He wouldn’t dare interrupt Mycroft, because he doesn’t look forward to the sort of wrath he’d get from doing so, and he thinks that Mycroft won’t mind if he leaves. It’s not as though Mycroft wants him around, and surely, it’d be better for them all if Sherlock learns how to handle himself.

Which is how Sherlock finds himself wandering the streets of the city center alone, having slipped away without Mycroft noticing. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he knows where he is. There’s a map of the city back at the flat that he had found and looked over. He can see it in his mind still, the turns and cross streets, the green shaded areas that signify parks, tube stations and hospitals. He has no plans to visit any of those. Really, he has no plan at all, because his mind is so focused on the walking aspect, that the ‘where to’ part of the equation falls by the wayside.

If he can, he keeps close to the sides of buildings, fingertips dragging along over brick and plaster, metal and wood. It helps him to feel grounded, that he’s somehow still attached to what’s going on around him. If he’s ever in doubt, the textures reassure him.

There’s a used bookstore on Baker Street that he discovers by accident. He can’t remember this part on his mind map, so he sets about cataloguing the things he finds on this street, but the used bookstore is his favorite discovery in the city so far. The name of the place is irrelevant, but there’s a tinny chime of a bell overhead as he pushes the door open that he files away in his mind as the marker for this place. He quickly adds the smell of musty old paper and cinnamon too. 

It’s a small shop, packed to the brim with volumes of all subjects. His fingers are itching to move things around, and he wonders who here is in charge of organization, because it certainly isn’t very good. Nowhere near to Sherlock’s standards, but then again, few things are. 

The thing that stands out most in his mind though, is the silence that wraps around him like his heavy blanket at home. It’s soothing and weighted, and makes Sherlock think of wool. The silence _feels_ like the plushest wool he’s ever felt and he wants nothing more than to curl up in it, press his cheek against it and burrow down until all other influences are nothing but muted sensations on the outside.

He doesn’t have very many favorite places outside of his home, but he thinks he can add this place to the short list. There, the sorts of things he loves the most surround him. Things like perfect silence, backed up by the calmness the shelves of books invoke him as they tower above him. The sheer amount of knowledge he could gain from these books overwhelms him, half with anxiety of the mass of information that surrounds him on all sides, and half with giddy excitement. He wants to devour it all. He wants to make these books his own. Even the ones with uninteresting subjects would be nice additions to his collection at home. 

He thinks about Mycroft for a moment as he stops in front of a section of old books about law and economics. The spines are faded, some peeling back all together from the pages they bind. The faded mustard, navy blue, and burgundy colors are pleasing to Sherlock’s eye, but he doesn’t touch them yet. Mycroft would like it here. It’s the sort of place they would have sought out and explored together if things were different. He touches a gentle fingertip to the spines of the books he thinks Mycroft would read to him if just speaking to Sherlock weren’t so difficult for him.

The hours creep by and Sherlock is so swept up in his new discovery, he hardly realizes so much time has passed. Others stop into the shop, but he takes no notice of them from the corner he’s claimed as his own, curled up with a French to English dictionary and an old chemistry textbook written in French. As far as he’s concerned, he’s the only one that’s been in the shop since the dawn of time. It’s slow going, committing bits and pieces from another language into his mind with all the others, but it slots in with the rest as though it is meant to be there. The words feel round on his tongue as he whispers them and tries to piece together sentences.

It’s dark outside when he lifts his nose from the pages and he figures that it’s probably time to return home. He gathers his pencil and notebook that’s nearly full with all the things he’s jotted down today and puts them in his pocket, lifting up the small stack of books he had acquired over his time there. He knows he should put them away, but he hugs them to his chest anyway as he wanders back towards the front. He doesn’t want to let them go, a part of him has already claimed them as his own, and he can’t possibly think about parting with them. It’s making him panic a little bit, because stealing is a terrible thing to do, but leaving these books behind seems just as devastating.

As he reaches the till, he’s stopped in his tracks by a curious item on the desktop. There’s a bee encased entirely in glass and mounted on an oval piece of wood. It reminds Sherlock of the bird under a glass dome in his father’s old study, how all the broken pieces, glass and all, are still sitting in a dusty box in the bottom drawer of the desk. His father never put it back together and Sherlock knows he left it when he left them. He wonders if the glass encased bee would break if it fell too, if it’s owner would piece it back together the way his father never tried to.

The woman that rounds the corner quickly startles Sherlock and he drops the books in his arms with a gasp. She’s the first person he’s seen in there all day, which is strange, because he realizes she must work here. The nametag says Martha and she has a set of keys on a plastic, stretchy chain around her wrist. The size and style mean they’re meant for the front door. Her hair is pulled into a messy bun with a few wisps framing her face. Kind eyes and laugh lines make Sherlock believe she’s a good person. She must be if she’s in charge of Sherlock’s favorite place, after all.

“Oh!” she gasps, clutching at the floral fabric of her dress right above her heart. “Goodness, you surprised me, dear. I didn’t know anyone was still in here. We closed an hour ago. Did you not hear the call? Well, no matter…” 

There’s a pause as though she is waiting for Sherlock to speak up and explain his presence, but he doesn’t want to, and doesn’t think he actually could even if he did want to. He’s never been good at social interactions with people outside of his family and the therapists. If he has to interact with others, he likes to have time to prepare himself for it, but spur of the moment meetings like this leave him feeling shaken and nervous. The woman seems to understand this, because she just offers him a gentle smile as though she’s telling him to take his time as she leans down to gather the books Sherlock dropped.

“What’s your name then?” she asks him, straightening back up. “You can call me Mrs. Hudson. I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before. Are your parents here with you?”

Sherlock tells himself that this woman, Mrs. Hudson, means him no harm. She isn’t going to hurt him, and chances are that she’s not making him feel this way on purpose. It’s always difficult meeting new people, which is why Sherlock tends to avoid it if he can. They don’t always see the signs, subtle as they sometimes are. Mrs. Hudson watches him carefully, watching the way Sherlock’s eyes dart all over the place, flitting from one thing to the next. She’s seen shy children before, of course she has, but this particular child seems a bit different, entirely unsure as though he’s never held a conversation with another person in his entire life. She’s just about to repeat her question when Sherlock’s eyes land on the bee again and his voice finally seems to catch back up with him.

“That’s a bee,” he says, gesturing towards the paperweight, then drawing his hand back towards his mouth where he touches his fingers along his bottom lip. “There are over twenty thousand species of bees in the world and about two hundred and fifty native to Britain. Extreme changes in environment have… have caused problems for bees, resulting in population decreases and even extinction for some species. But that’s a honeybee. _Apis mellifera_. Is it yours? Honeybees don’t need to hibernate during the winter months like other types of bees do. They create enough honey to survive the winter. Other species have queen bees that hibernate and survive the winter, and all the other ones die, but not honeybees. Most colonies have between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand bees in their population. That’s a lot of honey. Honeybees are not naturally aggressive. It’s okay to be afraid of them, but most times they’ll only attack and sting if the hive is threatened or if they’re afraid, so you shouldn’t get too close to a hive unless you are a beekeeper and understand hive dynamics and bee behavior. I don’t know all that yet, so I keep away from them.”

Mrs. Hudson opens her mouth to say something, to maybe stop the onslaught of information about an insect she cares very little for, but Sherlock is eager and she can tell. The way he starts to smile and gesture wildly with his hands as he takes her through what can probably pass for an encyclopedia article on bees. 

He likes to share things about topics he finds interesting, and most people find it off putting, but Mrs. Hudson holds her ground, arms crossed casually as she becomes one of the only people Sherlock has ever encountered that seems to be actually listening to what he’s saying. Saying a simple hello to a person is difficult, because there are so many possible outcomes, but if he introduces a topic of interest, he has a better chance of understanding where the conversation is going, and therefore less of a chance of losing control of it.

“Well aren’t you just the bees knees,” she smiles down at him.

Sherlock’s brows come together for a moment and his gaze makes it as far as her shoulder before he looks away again in confusion.

“The phrase ‘the bees knees’ is built on the myth that bees actually have knees,” he tells her. “Bees have six legs and they do have joints, but there are no kneecaps, so saying that is not true.”

“I…” she starts, then pauses as she thinks about it. “I had no idea. That’s _fascinating_.”

She’s being honest with him, that much Sherlock can tell and it eases his anxieties a bit now that he’s not so afraid of being told to be quiet. He hasn’t had a proper audience, someone to hold an actual conversation with, for a long time now, not since Mycroft changed, and it’s a nice feeling, he decides. Mrs. Hudson seems to have passed the test Sherlock had given her without him even realizing that’s exactly what it had been.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes.”

They don’t shake hands, Sherlock doesn’t like it, but they share a smile, one that grows even wider on Sherlock’s face as Mrs. Hudson hands Sherlock the paperweight and tells him he can keep it in exchange for teaching her about bees. He treats it with the utmost care as she ushers him from the shop, locking the door after she follows him out.

She has a sneaking suspicion that Sherlock is there without his parents’ knowing about it, and she smiles fondly at the innocent rebellion. There is something about Sherlock that she’s drawn to that she can’t quite put her finger on. Her maternal instinct to protect this quirky child is overwhelming. He doesn’t seem to have much knowledge in the way of social situations and he seems a bit off kilter in his mannerisms, but he’s already insinuated himself into her heart as a dear one.

Sherlock commits more of the city to his memory as they walk instead of talking. The city looks different at night and he realizes he needs to make another map of it for nighttime, because it would be easy to get disoriented. 

He leads the way back to the flat and Mrs. Hudson is following him if only to make sure nothing happens to him on his way, because she has no doubt at all that can find his way back without help. Mostly she just wants to return Sherlock to his family safe and sound with the reassurance that he’s been tucked away in a bookshop all day as opposed to the multitude of unsavory things that could have befallen him. 

Sherlock finds that he likes the company. Even though neither of them speak, the silence between them isn’t dark and awkward like it most often is when he’s around other people.

When Sherlock finally stops in front of a building and hops up the few steps to the door, Mrs. Hudson stands patiently at the bottom as Sherlock knocks. The woman who answers seems to be in hysterics as she nearly faints upon seeing Sherlock standing there. If Mrs. Hudson’s suspicions weren’t confirmed before, they certainly were now. 

“Where have you been, Sherlock?! I was worried sick about you. Your brother said you just left the park without saying anything! You know you don’t do things like that.”

Mrs. Hudson steps forward with a smile then into the triangle of light shining from inside. “You must be Sherlock’s mother. I’m Martha. It seems as though he found his way into my bookstore at some point today, clearly without your permission or knowledge. Children do the strangest things… I found him after closing and wanted to return him to you safely, though now that I think about it, perhaps I should have rang ahead.”

Sherlock’s mother looks up from the tight embrace she’s swept her youngest into and that Sherlock is trying to wriggle away from, surprise evident on her face. Like any mother, she thought the worst when Mycroft came home in a bit of a panic himself over the fact that he had lost his little brother. 

“Yes, I… Thank you,” she says, letting out a slow breath and petting her hand through Sherlock’s dark hair. “I apologize on his behalf if he in any way bothered you. He doesn’t always understand.”

A small frown appears on Mrs. Hudson’s generally happy face, and when she looks at Sherlock, she can see the boy’s cheeks are flushed in embarrassment or shame, possibly both as though he’s heard these things before. He clutches the paperweight to his chest and doesn’t bother trying to correct his mother that he understands more than he’s ever given credit for. Sherlock can’t make himself look at the nice woman from the bookstore, because he’s afraid she won’t want to be his friend either as often happens when his mother tells people he doesn’t understand. He’s always written off as a lost cause.

But Mrs. Hudson is full of surprises for Sherlock. She says, “Oh, on the contrary, Mrs. Holmes. You have a smart boy there. In fact, he told me all about honeybees this evening. I never would have thought about half the things he told me. Did you know bees don’t have kneecaps?”

Sherlock’s mother doesn’t quite know how to respond to the other woman and makes a halfhearted attempt at polite conversation before Mrs. Hudson excuses herself with a goodbye and an invitation to the shop any time he wishes specifically for Sherlock. That alone is enough to get him through the punishment he receives once the door is closed. His mother takes away his violin and says he can’t touch it for a week, and Sherlock’s skin crawls at the thought of not being able to play for that long, but he when he looks at the bee, he smiles and remembers the peace he felt in the cozy little book shop on Baker Street.

* * *

There is a stream lined with poplar trees and yew about a mile northeast of the house that Sherlock has frequented since he was allowed outside of the grounds. It’s a small stream, almost invisible amongst the trees and undergrowth. The poison ivy scattered about is enough to keep most people away, but Sherlock found a pair of wellies in the garden shed he wears to protect himself on his excursions. It isn’t beautiful or anything, at least not to Sherlock who sees things a bit differently than his peers. He sees it as a prime spot for data collection, and a good place to see science at work.

He used to go with Mycroft, but Mycroft is gone. University graduates and aspiring government officials don’t have the time to go exploring with their little brothers. In all honesty, Sherlock wouldn’t dare ask Mycroft such a silly thing anyway, because he’s learned over the years when the proper time is to speak to his brother, and it isn’t very often. He hasn’t spoken more than a handful of words to Mycroft in years.

He keeps to himself mostly. It’s not by choice, as he doesn’t see hardly anybody aside from his mother and his tutors. He never was allowed to go to public school like Mycroft and he hates it, but he’s grown used to it and reminds himself that he doesn’t understand.

With his collection bucket and a few tools in hand, Sherlock sets out just after lunch. He didn’t eat it, but he tucks a few biscuits away into his pocket, wrapped in a napkin in case he decides he’s hungry while he’s out. Most of the time, he does so anyway, because he likes breaking off pieces for the birds and the resident squirrel of his favorite tree.

He hops over rocks and tree roots that poke up out of the earth, and uses his scissors to snip leaves and blossoms from various plants. He doesn’t have a set experiment in mind for any of these things, but collecting is part of the fun of it all anyway. He collects dirt samples from different spots in little jars, thinking of cataloguing the different organisms he finds from each place and wonders if he would be allowed to extend the parameters of the experiment and gather samples from places farther than the house and the village surrounding it. Sherlock bets London soil is vastly different from soil found on the bank of a stream.

A small pond of murky water cut off from the rest of the stream catches Sherlock’s eye and he crouches down to observe the tiny population of tadpoles that flicker and dart around. 

“ _Pelophylax ridibundus_ ,” he whispers. “Marsh frog. Closely related to _Pelophylax esculentus_ and _Pelophylax lessonae_.”

He has a jar he can put them and a bit of water in to take back home, but after the field mice last Spring, Sherlock’s been forbidden from bringing any animals inside the house. It’s a shame, because he can already imagine watching the tadpoles grow and evolve into frogs. His mother hated the mice. Sherlock shudders to think what she might say about these slimy things, as important to his research as they are. 

He’s vaguely aware of the group of three boys coming his way on the opposite side of the stream. Sherlock has seen them before and intends to ignore their existence just like the other times, because they’re not relevant to his world right then, but then all three of them splash into the stream, shouting and laughing and ripping into Sherlock’s focused attentions with no regard. Snippets of their conversation cut through his concentration, things like films Sherlock hasn’t seen, or some girl called Veronica’s party last weekend was terrible, and new shoes for sports, and Sherlock is fine with pretending those things and these boys don’t exist for him. Only, it’s hard to do so when one of them kicks a large rock into the pool he had been studying.

“Hey kid, what are you doing?” the tall one asks. 

Sherlock sits in his crouch for a moment longer, staring intently at their shoes before he rises to his feet, though his eyes don’t move much higher than the torn knees of the boys’ denims.

He isn’t sure how to answer the question. He’s never been good with those sorts of questions, and technically, he isn’t very good at anything social, but questions like that throw him off especially, because he frets about whether or not there is a definitive answer to what’s being asked. He likes black and white things, but this is a grey area and Sherlock doesn’t reply right away. It earns him a few sideways glances and sneers, but he’s used to those coming from people he isn’t acquainted with.

“You deaf or somethin’? I said what are you doing?”

He means to say that he intends to collect samples of the area to take back home and look at under the microscope he got for his thirteenth birthday, but the words get lodged in his throat, caught up on something sharp that isn’t really there. Sherlock decided it was a sharp thing keeping his words at bay when he couldn’t describe it as anything else.

What he says instead is this: “You are the second owner of those shoes.”

The tall boy squints at Sherlock for a moment, sizing him up before he cracks a smile. “No I’m not. Got these new.”

“No. You didn’t. Secondhand. You have weak arches. I can see from the bottoms. The person before you walked more on the outsides of their feet. The wear is deeper and older on the outside. You are right handed, but the previous owner was left handed. The eyelets on the left are looser from where the person pulled tighter on the laces through them with their dominant hand, and the left shoe is more worn. Scuff marks commonly found on trainers of football players. So they kicked with their left foot more often.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, you little shit.”

Sherlock winces at the name, feeling like he’s losing control of the situation, so he pushes on, because it’s the one thing he can control and he’s clinging to it desperately, even though the face of the boy with the secondhand trainers grows redder and more angrier with each passing word. Sherlock has never learned that adolescent boys can be fiercely protective of their pride, and Sherlock is trampling all over it. Pride, after all, is something Sherlock isn’t sure he’s ever felt before.

“You’re from the village and your family doesn’t have a lot of money, so they buy secondhand. Your shirt wasn’t yours originally either. It’s got a stain on the collar. Coffee. I’m not sure you drink coffee and you take care of your belongings and wouldn’t let a stain set that long. So, previous owner. Right?”

Sherlock didn’t think it could be a possibility, so when the boy’s fist slams into his eye, he’s caught entirely off guard. He drops his collection bucket as he stumbles back, pressing his palm against his now throbbing eye and cheek and stares at the three boys as if he’s suddenly just now seeing them.

“You're a freak!”

The sounds of friends trying to comfort friends faded as the boys turned their backs on Sherlock and stomped off through the grass in the direction they had come from, leaving Sherlock standing there in confusion. He doesn’t understand why the boy had been so offended, let alone why he was so angry, because Sherlock was just speaking the truth, saying what he saw, and most of all, he had heard the boys speaking about their new shoes as they approached him and thought that could be his way into their world. He thought if he spoke about something familiar to them as well, things would go smoothly.

His fingertips feel ice cold against the burning and swelling skin, and aside from the pain, all he’s thinking about is what he’s going to tell his mother. He already knows she will be disappointed, because it’s not the first time Sherlock has upset people with what he says, and she never really believes him when he tells her he doesn’t do it on purpose with the intent to upset others, he really doesn’t.

He gathers up the spilled leaves into the bucket again and crumbles up the biscuits in his pocket for the birds before he begins the trek home, feeling significantly less excited about his planned experiments than he had when he set out a few hours ago. He can’t stop going over the confrontation in his head, rewinding and playing it back, speaking it out loud in the hopes that maybe that’ll ease his mind. A few times he pauses in the grassy fields and brings his arm up to his mouth and rocks back and forth on his feet for a few moments. It helps him feel centered, but all he’s left with are more questions and not enough time to answer them before he arrives back home.

He thinks maybe next time he’ll have better luck with people and forces himself to not think the obvious that it’ll always be _maybe next time_ and maybe the time after that too, and it will never be a day where Sherlock manages to successfully navigate his way into a friendship.

A sleek black company car is parked just inside the gate and Sherlock’s stomach sinks, because this means Mycroft has come home for a visit. Mycroft always needs an audience for his accomplishments these days and their mother is always happy to oblige. Normally, Sherlock stays in his room when his brother is around, but generally speaking, he hasn’t come home with a black eye before. Attention will be drawn to it, despite his best efforts.

He stands on the bottom stone step at the back door for a moment, wrist pressed to his lips. He doesn’t bite and he lets his arm down before he goes inside. He’s going to be in enough trouble as it is, he doesn’t really want to add stimming to the list of things to be confronted about that night.

He makes it upstairs and to his room without running into anybody, figuring Mycroft and their mother are probably in the sitting room conversing candidly about whatever great thing Mycroft’s done this time. He organizes his findings on his desk, thinking bitterly about how nobody wants to talk with him about the things he’s discovered. He can identify plants just by looking at them under a microscope and he’s already written a twelve page research paper on amino acids in regards to neurochemistry, but he’s not Mycroft and interested in law and politics, so it doesn’t really matter.

In theory, he probably can just hide away in his room for the rest of the night, but he’s feeling peckish after having skipped lunch and it will only delay the inevitable, so he pulls on a snug fitting jumper and tightens his scarf around his neck before he slinks his way downstairs and into the sitting room. The hope that Mycroft and their mother would be too engrossed in themselves to notice him were dashed instantly when he barely sets foot in the room and his mother is gasping and on her feet, taking his chin in his hand and tilting his face up before he can flinch away.

“What happened?” she demands and Sherlock can’t answer, because he doesn’t quite know what happened anyway, so he shrugs a shoulder and hopes that’ll be enough to get her off his case. “Sherlock Holmes, you tell me what happened right this instant or you’ll lose privileges.”

Losing privileges is Sherlock’s least favorite thing, because there are so few things he’s really attached to, that to have one taken away from him is always devastating. The last time, his mother had locked up his microscope for a week, and when his field mice had babies, his violin was taken away for a month. 

“I fell,” he tells her. Mycroft snorts from the sofa, but says nothing and their mother doesn’t seem to have heard it. “I was chasing a marsh frog. I saw tadpoles and then I went looking for a grown one, but it wouldn’t sit still, so I ran after it and tripped over a fallen branch. It got away though.”

The story, hastily made up though it is, seems to have made some sort of sense to her, because her face softens and she gives Sherlock’s other cheek a gentle pat. She gives him that look he recognizes as being a nonverbal sort of ‘poor darling just doesn’t get it’, and he knows it’s meant to comfort him, that gentle stare of his mother’s, but it does the opposite. It makes him feel self-conscious. It makes him wonder if there had been a better thing to say than what he did.

All in all, Sherlock is getting better at lying. He doesn’t do so very often if he doesn’t have to, but long gone are the times when people could see right through his lies, and Sherlock is quite happy about that, because lying is easier to navigate than truth telling, because lying is just telling people what they want to hear, and by doing so, he avoids situations entirely that make him uncomfortable. It isn’t a skill he’s decided to practice further just yet, but it’s always lingering in the back of his mind for occasions such as this, when he knows the alternative would be a lot more humiliating.

Sherlock settles himself on the window seat looking out at the front garden and their mother excuses herself to freshen up for supper. She only does that when Mycroft is around like she’s somehow trying to impress her own son. When Mycroft isn’t there, most often Sherlock eats alone in the kitchen. There’s never a formal affair when it’s just the two of them, but he forgets that Mycroft is some kind of official now, and as such, he most probably requires this sort of fanfare now.

It’s silent in the room for a few long moments where Sherlock thinks too much about all sorts of things and where Mycroft thinks too much about Sherlock. Their relationship has all but deteriorated into a few words once or twice a year now, and Mycroft realizes that he doesn’t know a thing about his brother any more. He has no idea what Sherlock is interested in, how he feels about anything, if he still throws tantrums, if he reverts to sign language when he feels anxious. The list could go on for an age and it’s terribly depressing, but Mycroft thinks they’re long past trying to patch things up.

Though, he doesn’t figure being civil to his little brother will tip the scales too drastically. He rises from his spot on the sofa and sits at the opposite end of the window seat, looking Sherlock over. He’s had a growth spurt since he last saw him. What was once a small for his age child has been replaced by a tall, lanky teenager that seems to be all awkward angles, long limbs and messy hair. There’s a spike of something unpleasant in his chest when he thinks about how as an older brother, he should have been more present during this time for Sherlock to ask questions of, but what’s done is done, and he’s certain Sherlock taught himself all he needed to know out of his books.

“So. What did you say to them?” Mycroft asks bluntly. “Don’t give me that look, you may have fooled Mummy, but I’m not stupid.”

Sherlock watches as Mycroft smooths down his silken tie and absently mimics the motion with his own scarf. There must be a correct answer for this question, but Sherlock thinks he probably won’t get it right, because he hasn’t gotten one right so far that day, or in a long while actually.

He thinks _I just wanted to be their friend_ , but he says, “His shoes weren’t new.”

“Hm.” Mycroft hums quietly. He remembers when Sherlock was four and their father had smacked him across the face, how they had been on the same side then.

It’s a quiet sound that Sherlock doesn’t know how to interpret, which makes knowing whether or not he said the right thing even more difficult. But Mycroft doesn’t seem angry with him, and Sherlock knows what exactly that looks like, so he relaxes.

“I got a microscope,” Sherlock says, pulling at the fraying end of his scarf. “For my birthday.”

“This year?”

“No.”

“Oh. Right.”

Mycroft hasn’t been home for Sherlock’s birthday in four years, it makes sense that he doesn’t remember that Sherlock had gotten the microscope for his thirteenth. It makes sense that he wouldn’t know that Sherlock had been very disappointed that he didn’t have anybody to share the great news with. The conversation fades back to their usual nothing and Mycroft eventually gets up and goes to look at the bookcase. Sherlock watches his brother’s reflection in the window until their mother calls them for supper.

The proper dinning table is much too big for three people, and they look strange all seated down at one end with their mother at the head and Mycroft and Sherlock on each side. A roast chicken and vegetables has been prepared for the evening, followed by some sort of sickeningly sweet dessert that Sherlock’s been able to smell all day, but Sherlock has a small bowl of plain pasta sitting in front of him instead. He picks at it and doesn’t miss Mycroft’s comment on how it’s ridiculous to still cater to Sherlock’s picky eating habits. 

“Sit still Sherlock,” their mother scolds him, pointing her fork in his direction.

He isn’t even aware that he had been doing anything, but he can tell by the exasperated look on his mother’s face that he was rocking in his chair again. He has the urges mostly under control now. He sets aside time every night to stim to his heart’s content when he knows his mother is in bed, or when he’s alone, but sometimes he slips up. He hasn’t lost a privilege in a while though, so he thinks that he must be doing better at controlling himself.

The conversation continues despite the momentary pause and Sherlock is only half listening, but judging by their mother’s reactions and the way she fawns over Mycroft, Sherlock’s half convinced that Mycroft saved the world from some sort of nuclear disaster. Mycroft has probably saved the world a hundred times over at this point, and Sherlock feels incredibly inferior, because he’s not so sure anything that he’s done can be considered great on the same level as Mycroft. 

“Why do you never talk with me?” he asks suddenly, halting the other’s conversation midsentence.

Their mother slides her focus slowly from her eldest to Sherlock who seems to be trying to dissect a noodle with his fork. “What are you talking about, Sherlock, of course we talk with you.”

“No,” he shakes his head. “You-You talk _at_ me. You don’t talk _with_ me. You don’t talk with me the way you talk with Mycroft.”

“Don’t be silly, Sherlock,” Mycroft adds, his fork clinking as he sets it down on his plate.

“Sometimes I want to talk too. I have a lot of things I want to talk about. I know a lot of stuff we can talk about. You can even pick a topic and we can talk about it. I can learn about it and then we can talk about it.”

When Sherlock looks up from his half eaten bowl of pasta, he sees his mother and his brother looking at him in _that way_ again. It’s pity. They pity him and Sherlock doesn’t understand why, because he hasn’t done anything especially worth being pitied for. Maybe his loneliness is palpable and they can tell, and that’s why they pity him. Sherlock may only be sixteen, but he most definitely knows what it truly means to be lonely. 

He feels so isolated always, even within his own family that it’s sometimes hard to breathe with the anxiety of not knowing what he else can possibly do to fit in with them. His heart his pounding against his ribs and his breath picks up a little as neither one of them says anything at all, and the point of speaking up had been to initiate conversation. He had been concise and to the point, but still, he gets nothing.

“I just want to talk!” he shouts at them. “I want you to talk with me! Why won’t you say anything? Is it because I don’t understand? I know I don’t understand a lot, but if you talked with me, maybe I could. Maybe I could and then we could talk properly like you and Mycroft!”

Their mother rises to her feet, tossing her napkin down beside her plate and fixing Sherlock with a thunderous glare that Sherlock cowers a little from. She gets angry with him quite often, but he hasn’t gotten used to it when he thinks he probably should have.

“You will not raise your voice at the dinner table, Sherlock Holmes, do you understand me? If you want to talk, you will act like a civilized human being first. You are excused, now go to your room.”

It isn’t the result Sherlock wanted, but then again, now that he’s said all of that, he’s not really expecting much for his efforts. He looks at Mycroft who is staring at him with his brow arched in a smug ‘well that went quite well, didn’t it?’ sort of look, which enrages Sherlock so much he stands with enough force to knock his chair over. He shoves his bowl off the table and watches it shatter before he darts away from the table and towards the stairs. He even slams his bedroom door for good measure, though it’s not going to do much of anything.

He wonders what will be taken away from him this time as he throws himself onto his bed, sticking his head beneath his pillow. For all he knows, he might have all his things taken away and all he’ll be left with is a vacant room with a mattress in the corner, and while that thought is unbearable, it’s not quite so bad as the realization that his mother and brother don’t seem to want to talk with him, though he originally asked as nicely as he was capable of doing at first. He wants to be included in _something_ , anything at all, anything to kill the loneliness that eats away at his insides with ferocity. 

So all consuming is this new feeling, that Sherlock is certain it’s going to swallow up him and the only trace that he had ever been there will be a half full notebook of his thoughts lying open on his bedside table.

Sherlock knows nobody would read his notebooks should something ever happen to him. They’re full of useless things, scribbles that mean nothing at all to anybody but himself. Even he struggles some days to find relevance in all the details laid out in his messy, scrawling script. The only relevant thing in the notebooks that he constantly looks back on is the list of words to describe himself. The list is short so far, since he’s only just started it, and it reads like this: _retarded, stupid, embarrassing, careless, freak_. He reaches for the notebook and adds _pitiable_.

Words are fickle, and they hurt and sting and bite, and Sherlock wishes he didn’t have them. Sometimes he wishes he had his older brother there to complete sign letters with him again. It’s a lonely conversation when one has no counterpart in signed communication. His mother refuses to participate.

‘M’ is for milk and Mondays and Mummy and Mycroft and maybe one day they’ll fix their broken parts again. ‘S’ is for strawberries and Saturdays and Sherlock and sad and stupid how could he be so stupid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the delay with this chapter. It was the end of the semester and it sucked my soul. I hope this makes up for it!


	4. Catastrophe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A skull makes for a good companion, even though it doesn’t speak or contribute to the conversation or the relationship as a whole. But it’s there and it makes more sense to speak to something that had once been rather than something that never was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought after an age of not updating, I would finally just post what I have of chapter four, because it doesn't interrupt the flow. However, this chapter is not entirely complete! 
> 
> Please pay attention to the warnings. Though the violence is not graphically described, it still may be triggering to some.
> 
> I am not an expert on the topics presented here. I am an expert on myself and my experience with autism. I have done my research and I hope that I have done this topic justice. I am open to constructive criticism, especially if I've gotten something blatantly wrong. I want to represent the ideas in this story with as much respect and accuracy as possible.
> 
> I have a [tumblr](http://nauticus.tumblr.com/) now that I post about writing and other fandom-y things, if you lovely readers wanted to check the progress of this story!
> 
> Unbetaed.

A skull makes for a good companion, even though it doesn’t speak or contribute to the conversation or the relationship as a whole. But it’s there and it makes more sense to speak to something that had once been rather than something that never was.

 Sherlock finds the box with bird bones and glass in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk in his old study. It hasn’t been touched in six years at least, even though Sherlock sometimes pulls open the drawer to look at it and wonder why his father never pieced it back together; if he never did because the fragments reminded him of something unpleasant, and Sherlock thinks that it most probably has something to do with him. Whenever he’s around, things oftentimes break and there are so many pieces, he’s given up on trying to fix them. 

The box sits on his own desk unopened for a week before he gives in and eases the lid off, setting it aside as he peers into the mess of shards and bone fragments. The bright morning light from his window cuts across the box and the bits of glass sparkle a silvery blue. Sherlock tells himself that the bones are not nearly as fascinating lying in a pile of rubble as they had been perched whole under the glass dome, but he’s really just trying to scramble the memories he associated with them so they’re no longer important or relevant. If there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that memories, good or bad, do nothing but skew the present reality, and the present reality is all Sherlock has. 

He loses long moments to the box of bones, standing there before it, hardly blinking. His tattered scarf sways with each breath he takes and by the time he shakes himself out of it, his wrist is pressed to his lips as he fights the urge to bite. There’s nobody there to see him, but he associates the bones with his father and some microscopic part of him is still trying desperately to gain his father’s approval. 

When he rescued the box from the old study, Sherlock had been intending to rebuild the bird and maybe find a new perch for it, but now as he stands, gazing down at the pieces, he thinks that he’s tired of trying to patch everything back together. There are too many pieces, broken and sharp, and he doesn’t much feel like being cut again. He frees the skull from beneath a large, curved piece of glass and then replaces the lid of the box and shoves it into the bottom drawer of his own desk, because he thinks that’s the proper place for those memories; somewhere dark where they can fester out of sight. The skull gets its own place on the windowsill. 

*** 

Sherlock sits on his bedroom floor surrounded by piles of loose papers and stacked books; the bits and pieces and little trinkets from his experiments scattered about in their precise places. He’s created the perfect environment for himself, tailored specifically to his needs and desires. All other places are for other people, never him, and though his mother protests at the mess, Sherlock finds himself right at home amongst all the clutter. In a way, it is another boundary he has set up to keep people away, because his mother no longer comes into his room for the fact that she says the mess upsets her, and it’s silly to assume anybody else would venture into the space. Sherlock has a reputation in the home, and that is where he is, nobody else really ought to be for their own sanity. 

He turns the page of the Sunday paper he had taken from the kitchen that morning, eyes scanning the mostly pointless articles. He’s looking for something specific, but is interrupted by the snap of his bedroom door shutting. He does a double take when he sees Mycroft standing there, looking as regal as always in his tailored suit and slicked back hair. He’s nothing like the boy Sherlock remembers he used to be. If he wants to find a trace of the brother that used to be his entire world, Sherlock has to squint and if he’s lucky, he might see that once familiar smile. 

It seems an age before Mycroft looks at Sherlock and by that point, Sherlock has risen to his feet, hands twisted nervously in the ends of his scarf. The surprise of his brother turning up in his bedroom has faded into anxiety and worry over the cause of Mycroft’s visit, because Sherlock knows Mycroft avoids seeking him out if he can help it. 

There are a lot of things he could be doing for Mycroft, who is technically a guest in his bedroom, and he goes through the list of things he’s picked up from when their mother invites guests over for her dinner parties. If Mycroft had a coat, Sherlock knows he should ask to take it, but their mother probably took care of that downstairs. He should offer Mycroft something to drink, but that’s impossible, so he does the next best thing he can think of and clears off his desk chair so Mycroft can sit if he wants to. 

Part of him hopes Mycroft does sit and stay for a little while, but the other, much larger part of him wants for his brother to leave, because his very presence makes Sherlock anxious in a way few things can. He doesn’t quite know what to think when Mycroft seems to accept his offer of the chair and sits down, eyes still scanning the room with a faint hint of what Sherlock thinks must be disgust on his face. 

“Mother wishes for you to join us downstairs,” Mycroft finally says, breaking the silence with the only conversation they seem to be capable of these days. There are no hellos or a nice to see you, just demands and tight, forced snippets. 

Sherlock finds himself sitting on the edge of his bed a few feet away from his brother, wondering if this is too close, if he should move away to give Mycroft the room he might require. When Mycroft smooths his tie down, Sherlock mimics the motion with his scarf as he always does, for some reason feeling like copying the things other people do might tether him more firmly to the situation at hand. 

It takes him a few long moments to work up the courage to reply and even longer for him to accept that he needs to do so out loud, because Mycroft doesn’t sign with him anymore, among many other things. 

“No,” he says, his voice cracking around the syllable. 

It’s been days now since he’s last spoken, but Mycroft demands it of him and Sherlock fears most that if he doesn’t act properly that Mycroft is going to go rushing off to tell their mother and he’ll have privileges taken away.  It hasn’t happened recently, because Mycroft has matured, but a few years ago, what Mycroft wouldn’t do to catch Sherlock doing something he wasn’t meant to. It was a twisted, one-sided rivalry that left their already tattered and frayed relationship in absolute shambles along with Sherlock’s trust in his older brother. Sherlock looks at every one with suspicion now and though he doesn’t dare ask the reasoning behind it, Mycroft understands perfectly well that he’s at least partly the cause, if not entirely. 

In amusement, Mycroft realizes that for as much as Sherlock can’t look him in the eye, he can’t look at Sherlock either. He looks around the room again instead, taking in details as though he might be able to learn all he needs to about his little brother just by observing his surroundings. He doesn’t dare ask Sherlock what sorts of things interest him. The very idea makes Mycroft’s skin crawl, and besides, he doesn’t really deserve to know. 

“Is this what you do then?” he asks Sherlock instead, eyes lingering on a newspaper opened to an article about that Powers boy that had been all over the news recently. “You read the papers and cut out articles? Paste them into a book?” 

Of course it’s what Sherlock does and Sherlock is confused for a moment as his eyes follow the same track that Mycroft’s did, over newspapers and books and ripped up slips of paper, and he wonders if this is a trick question; one he’s supposed to know the answer to. There must be a correct answer, or he figures that Mycroft wouldn’t have asked, but when the anxiety spikes and Sherlock comes up empty handed, he knows the right thing to say is eluding him. He nods slowly and Mycroft huffs out a quiet bark of a laugh.

“Aren’t you ever bored?” 

“Yes. I am. All the time. I am all the time.” 

He certainly does more than just simply read and cut up newspapers. Sherlock has his experiments too. He has books to read and essays and letters to write, and there are still parts of the stream and surrounding forest that he hasn’t explored yet, but along with his productive periods come the shutdowns and ever interfering meltdowns. 

Sherlock doesn’t have the right words to explain to anybody, let alone Mycroft, why he has good days and bad days, or why exactly bad days are so terrible in the first place. He knows people don’t think the way he does, that their brains must be different, because how can they take in and process so much information coming in from each of their senses and not feel overwhelmed? How do they not reach a breaking point the way he does, when it feels as though his mind is full up of sensory input without enough output in return? He can’t shut his brain off and sometimes it becomes too much, when there’s nothing for him to lose himself in adequately until the noise fades. 

Their mother calls them his tantrums or his stubborn moods, but he wonders if she would call them the same if she knew what it felt like to become so overwhelmed by her surroundings she no longer understands how to function the same way everybody else does. 

So, yes, Sherlock does get bored, but he doesn’t bother trying to explain to his brother what it feels like and why he dislikes the feeling to such an extent that he combs through newspapers each day. The years may have pushed them apart, but time has made it clear to Sherlock that his abnormalities make people uncomfortable, and as a guest in his room, Sherlock shouldn’t be making Mycroft feel that way. 

With a sigh, Mycroft accepts that he isn’t going to be getting a better answer out of Sherlock, and after all, Sherlock is no way obligated to answer his questions or speak to him at all, he supposes. He can remember still the way Sherlock had begged to have a conversation with him and their mother, but every effort on their part is always met with a Sherlock that seemingly wants no part it in. Mycroft conveniently forgets that Sherlock may want the conversation, but the anxiety nearly always wins out and keeps him away from it. 

But, Mycroft reminds himself, he hasn’t sought Sherlock out just to sit in awkward silence. Their mother had plead her case and sent him up in the hopes he could lure Sherlock back down. 

“What’s all this about university then?” he tries instead, in a way hoping for Sherlock to take the bait. 

Sherlock doesn’t suspect that Mycroft has an ulterior motive in speaking with him, but he can’t figure out why it’s happening. Regardless of the reason for it, Mycroft’s question still takes Sherlock by surprise for a moment before he realizes that of course mummy would have told Mycroft all about his desire to go to university in between the other, more important things they have to discuss. Sherlock thinks that he should stop being so surprised that Mycroft and their mother will speak freely and candidly with each other about him, but never with him. He sits there in stony silence, unwilling and a little bit unable to answer. 

“Do you want to attend university?” Mycroft presses, shaking his head a little in disbelief when he at last gets a slight nod of the head from his brother. “Sherlock, you can’t… You can’t actually…” 

Mycroft has to stop there before he says something else he’ll regret, though try as he might, he can’t picture Sherlock anywhere else but right where he is in that moment, perched on the edge of his bed, wrinkled and mismatching clothes, unruly hair, and what seems to be a general disinterest in everything around him. Even now as Mycroft strives for the conversation so wished for by Sherlock, he can’t see any hint of desire for it on Sherlock’s face. He doesn’t understand and feels as though he’s slowly running out of any desire to try. 

“Sherlock, you don’t speak,” Mycroft adds quietly. “To anyone. Mother says she tries and you just ignore her. You’re ignoring me right now. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you then if you’re just going to sit there and ignore everything I say.” 

He sinks back into the chair a little more, the wood creaking with the shifting of his weight, groaning in a way that Mycroft nearly wishes he was able to. It seems obvious at that point that he should just stop and move along, admit to defeat and go back downstairs. But he can’t take his eyes off Sherlock, who’s risen from the bed to crouch in front of a preciously tall tower of books and file folders. Mycroft wonders if he even realizes he’s there in the room with him still. 

“You’re in for a rude awakening, Sherlock,” Mycroft says, getting to his feet and smoothing the wrinkles in his suit out. “If you think going to school is about sitting silent in your own world, ignoring everything and everybody. You’ll not get an offer if you don’t speak, you do realize. You can’t just-“ 

“No one speaks to _me_!”  Sherlock abruptly shouts. 

He’s standing again, clutching an envelope in his hands and taking a great pleasure in the subtle change in Mycroft’s stance. Sherlock isn’t used to seeing his brother unsure and basks in it for the quick moment he has before Mycroft gathers himself back up again to his full height. 

“No one speaks to me,” Sherlock says again, quietly and more subdued as the reality of his words sinks in just a bit more for him. “You all… speak to one another. You have your conversations and your jokes and you don’t speak to me.” 

There isn’t a particular word to describe what Sherlock is feeling in that moment. He’s feeling too many things that choosing just one seems counterproductive, but neither does he try to work it out. He’s learned that taking too much time to examine those things ends with dark moods and darker thoughts. Besides, there isn’t any point at all in analyzing this, because it is what it is, and it’s not going to change. It’s fact. It’s static and black and white. 

What it must feel like to be thoroughly engaged in a conversation with another person. What it must feel like to not be on the outskirts, but swept up in the middle of something and not only that, but to contribute. Mycroft will never know that desire because it comes so easy to him, but silence is what Sherlock is good at. 

As expected, Mycroft says nothing, reinforcing the reality that Sherlock has described so much so that Sherlock huffs out a soft laugh as he drops the envelope on the chair Mycroft had previously occupied. It was more than he ever intended to say to Mycroft about it, because after that night at the dinner table all those months ago, Sherlock has all but given up on the idea of being included in his own family unit. He’s angry and he knows he can’t fix it, so he doesn’t dwell on it. Only, it’s impossible not to think of the burn of rejection when Mycroft is in _his_ space and flaunting his complete and utter _normality_ as though it’s something Sherlock should be personally striving for, and oh, how he tries. 

They are as distant as it’s possible for two brothers to be, but Sherlock has yet to take Mycroft down from the pedestal he placed him on when he was little. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Mycroft bend and pick up the folder in curiosity, but that curiosity turns into disbelief in seconds, and Sherlock has to fight not to flinch when he hears the short burst of laughter. 

“ _Cambridge_?” Mycroft snorts incredulously. “ _You_ want to go to _Cambridge_? Sherlock that’s-” 

“You went to Oxford,” Sherlock points out as though that’s all it takes to make his argument complete. 

“Yes, but I’m-“ 

“You’re what?” 

“If you would stop interrupting me, I might tell you,” Mycroft snaps. He takes a seat again and regards his brother for a moment, slowly shaking his head. “You and I are different, Sherlock.” 

“Obviously.” 

“No, I mean _you_ are different. You are-“ 

“I am what? I am the same age you were when you went. I-I know what I would like to study even. I can be independent. I can be. I can. The house would be empty the way Mummy likes it. I could come see you in the city? You wanted to study law and politics, but I would like to study chemistry. I wrote papers. I write them still. My tutors said they were good. I need to work a bit more on proper citations, but that’s hardly anything at all.” 

“That’s all well and good, but you can’t get by on papers you write in your spare time in the smaller schools, let alone a place like Cambridge,” Mycroft informs him, just a hint of smugness to his voice. 

Though they have both grown, Mycroft still has his personal grudge against his brother buried deep, but hardly deep enough to keep it from rising to the surface now and again. Their family has never been the same and he places the blame entirely on Sherlock to save himself the trouble of actually analyzing his feelings on the matter. 

Sherlock shuffles through a different pile of papers on the floor at the end of his bed and surfaces again moments later, his arms full of packets in varying degrees of thickness. He spreads them out on the desk in front of Mycroft, straightening each until the bottoms of the papers are perfectly aligned with the edge of his desk. 

“Gas and liquid chromatography. Fifteen pages. Environmental changes and the effect this has on bees. Twenty-one pages. Has a potential for at least thirty-five pages if I work a bit more on it. I have this one as well. Amino acids and neurochemistry. It’s only twelve pages. Short, but I have notebooks full up of things I can add. It’s really just an over view right now, but I think I could work on it. Make it a bit better. A bit longer. Yes?” 

The eagerness in Sherlock’s voice is unmistakable. His desire to prove that he is more than capable reaches out despite his wariness of Mycroft. Even Sherlock realizes that Mycroft can play an important part in getting him the one thing he wants. He thinks that if he shows how competent he can be if given the chance, then Mycroft could speak to their mother, as he is so good at doing. But as the seconds tick on, Sherlock’s hope fades little by little, and it’s dashed all together at the look of doubt Mycroft fixes on him. 

“ _No_ ,” he laughs, shaking his head. “That’s really not how this all works, Sherlock. Don’t be so silly. If all they wanted was a few mediocre essays written by a-a _child_ , they might as well do away with the entire admissions process.” 

Sherlock deflates, tugs on the ends of his scarf and says, “I am not a child.” The rest, he thinks, is probably true. 

“You might as well be for all your naivety!” 

His brother’s visit has done little except to reinforce what Sherlock already knows and hardly needs telling. He doesn’t suspect that Mycroft will even bother with the folder he gave him first, and even if he did, to what degree would it be beneficial, because he knows Mycroft is set in his beliefs, as is their mother. Trying seems rather pointless now. 

He says nothing and watches Mycroft scratch his nails against the thick paper before he catches him glancing down at it, the curiosity creeping back in. Mycroft smiles at it, almost fondly, as he remembers sending away for information on different schools just a bit younger than Sherlock is now. He thinks, as he flips the cover open, that it’s just as well that nothing will come of this, because Sherlock has all but proven how very much not ready he is to take such a leap. 

What Mycroft expects the folder’s contents to be is actually not at all what they are. Instead of brochures and pamphlets detailing the University’s values, programs, and student life, he sees instead a Cambridge University letterhead, followed by a ‘Dear Mr Sherlock Holmes’. 

“ _We are pleased to be able to make you a conditional offer of a place to read Natural Sciences, Chemistry, at St Catherine’s College_ ,” Mycroft reads aloud, at first slowly as though taking time to digest the words, then speeding up as the meaning becomes clear. “Good God… Sherlock, they’ve made you an offer!” 

When Sherlock had received the letter last week, he had spent an hour spinning about his room in excitement, because he had done it. He had done something nobody thought he could do, but his excitement over anything always turns into worry and fear, anxiety about disappointing the people that meant the most to him, even if those people didn’t seem to have any faith in him whatsoever. His smiles had faded as he hid his acceptance letter underneath books and papers, because if he can’t see it, he can pretend the problems didn’t exist. 

The regret he feels at showing his brother the folder at all weighs him down heavily in the middle of his chest, and he can’t tell if Mycroft’s surprise now is genuine or if he’s being mocked and made fun of again. He highly suspects it is the latter. Mycroft has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t believe Sherlock stands a chance at getting into a less respectable school, let alone such a prestigious place as Cambridge. The more Sherlock thinks about it, the more he thinks that maybe Mycroft is right, and he doesn’t quite know how to reply to his brother’s astonished outburst. 

“How on Earth did you pull this off?” Mycroft continues, as though Sherlock’s potential replies make no difference. 

He nearly considers this to be some sort of prank that Sherlock has put together, but one look at the boy says it all. This isn’t a joke. This is something potentially fantastic that has happened to Sherlock. This is also something that nobody knows what to do with. Sherlock wants to attend, but there’s a whole world of doubt swirling around in his head, tangling important things up. Their mother is convinced entirely that Sherlock isn’t ready to leave home. Mycroft isn’t sure what he thinks about it. He knows he should be happy for his brother for accomplishing something most people just dream about, and with all his setbacks too. 

But he keeps those feelings locked up, refusing to let them see the light of day. They have their roles in one another’s lives now, and his isn’t to encourage Sherlock’s ridiculous behaviors anymore. 

“Sherlock, really, how did you do this?” 

Sherlock’s right shoulder rises a few inches towards his ear in a shrug. This is another one of those frightful situations where he is almost certain that there is a right and a wrong answer for the question asked, and that if he answers incorrectly, everything will crumble. But he knows that if he doesn’t reply at all, something bad will happen. It is a no win situation and Sherlock is barely able to contain his anxiety. 

“I applied same as everyone else?” he offers. “I didn’t think… I didn’t expect anything to happen. I swear I didn’t. I just wanted to. I just wanted to see what it was like in case one day I was able to go to a place like that. I applied and put it all in the mail and that was it. I thought that was it, and then I got another letter in the mail saying I needed to go in for interviews, and I wasn’t going to, but then we went to London. Mummy had meetings with people for days and I thought… so I took a train and-“ 

“You took a train,” Mycroft repeats. “Alone. You took a train alone.” 

Sherlock barely spares a glance at Mycroft. The offense isn’t worth noting. 

“I took a train,” he says pointedly. “I got there and I was just going to look around, but I was there, so I thought why not? Doing the interviews doesn’t mean I’d get in. I knew I wouldn’t get in, because-because I messed it up. I… I took a long time to answer questions and some I didn’t even know the answer to at all, and I know my essays and school work aren’t that good. Then I came home and Mummy never knew I had been gone. Please don’t tell her. She’ll be angry with me. I’ll lose privileges.” 

Mycroft takes in each word Sherlock says, this ridiculous story growing and growing until he has to fight not to chuckle. Of course Sherlock would go and do something like this, and while most of him believe it’s just plain silly, there’s that small part of him that wants more than anything to be proud of Sherlock for doing this on his own. The feeling of pride is short and flickers out of existence nearly as quickly as it had come, but in it’s place it leaves a nameless feeling that makes up Mycroft’s mind for him. 

“I won’t tell her,” he concedes, snapping the folder shut in a definitive gesture that the topic was well and truly closed. 

Sherlock lets out the breath he’s been holding as he waits for what he was sure would be Mycroft racing from his room to divulge all this new information to their mother as though he were her little spy. He’s unaware that that is exactly the game Mycroft is playing, though he wouldn’t say as much. 

As far as Sherlock is concerned, the idea of him going off to Cambridge was just a little game to see if he could really do it, and now that he knows it’s possible, he can put it to rest and move on. 

Mycroft thinks he should leave now. He’s got what he came for and the range of topics he and Sherlock can properly discuss is limited at best, and at worst, it’s entirely nonexistent, but he stays put in his chair and flattens his tie again. He sees the way Sherlock’s hand slides down his scarf, copying the movements. He’s reminded instantly of Sherlock as a small child, mimicking everything and everybody, learning and growing, but the memories create an ice cold pit in the center of his chest, so he tries his best to forget them. 

“I’m meeting with Father tomorrow,” Mycroft says abruptly. He’s unsure why it even matters. It’s entirely irrelevant and he can only see things going far downhill from this point onwards. “Did you know he has a child now? With that _woman_.” 

Sherlock didn’t know that in fact, and he has no idea how to react to hearing such news. Whether or not he should be devastated or even happy for his father is a confusing path to navigate. He knows when people have children, it’s often times cause for congratulations and well wishes. When his father has children by another woman not their mother, his heart seems to shrivel a bit more beneath his ribs. He wonders if their mother knows and thinks she must, because sometimes she locks herself away in her bedroom and Sherlock can hear crying that sounds much too painful for a divorce. 

Mycroft looks indifferent; a carefully constructed mask put into place to keep other, less savory things from the surface. Inside, he bubbles over with rage and confusion of his own. Resentment upon resentment are stacked high and Mycroft barely has a grip on them, afraid of what might happen should the towers fall. 

“He wants to discuss our trusts. Most probably wants to set one up as well for that little _brat_. If it weren’t for damn familial obligations, I’d tell him where to stuff it. Well… anyway. I must be going. It was… _nice_ … seeing you, Sherlock.” 

Sherlock stands as Mycroft does, but he’s quiet as he processes the new information about his father, and how, if at any point before, he ever thought there might be some sort of reconciliation, he can just forget about that now. He needs time to figure out whether or not he’s hurt or angry or happy or sad, or any combination of those, but he wonders how he’s meant to process it all when he can’t even picture it. He has an image in his mind of what their family looks like. Their mother and Mycroft stand close to one another, and Sherlock is a little ways away, while their father stands at a great distance from them. There’s never another family that his father is in the middle of, but he thinks now that he should add that in; update his references so that it’s all correct and in good order. 

Mycroft is half way out of the door before Sherlock blinks back into the real world, and he takes a few hasty steps forward, sliding a bit on a stack of papers. 

“May I come?” he asks. 

Mycroft pauses and turns. “I’m sorry?” 

“May I come? With you. May I come with you to see Father?” 

Everything in Mycroft is shouting at him that this is a very bad idea. He doesn’t have a relationship one way or another with Sherlock, and inviting him to his flat so they can meet up with the father that abandoned them both and that Mycroft blamed Sherlock for is categorically one of the worst ideas that has ever been thought up. The words are on the tip of his tongue, and all he has to do is say them, sharp and to the point, and then he can be on his way, but he catches Sherlock’s eye for the briefest of moments and that feeling in his chest intensifies until he gives in to it. 

“You’ll have to ask Mummy,” he says, doubtful that anything good will come of this, but if Sherlock insists. 

At any rate, he will have accomplished what he told their mother he would do in bringing Sherlock back down stairs with him. 

Sherlock doesn’t smile, because some part of him knows this isn’t meant as a simple outing to the city, but rather a way for him to tie up some loose ends in regards to their father’s abandonment. The event has always been such a frayed and tattered thing in his mind, that he always thought if he could just give it a light tug, the entire thing would unravel thread by thread and there wouldn’t be any more hurt. If the entire thing unravels, maybe they wouldn’t remember it at all and instead of being afraid of Mycroft, he can be his brother again or maybe even his friend. 

Now it’s just a matter of going downstairs and asking their mother’s permission. It’s easier said than done, and though he’s followed Mycroft out into the hallway, he’s suddenly painfully aware that he’s going to have to be the one to ask for this. He knows it doesn’t need to be a big issue, that logically, he can march right down there and tell her exactly what he thinks of the matter, and that’s all perfectly alright in theory. In practice, Sherlock isn’t so sure he’ll be able to go through with it, thinking that he would much rather stay cooped up in his room than face the potential rejection from their mother. Sparing them all from that conversation would be a kindness, but he thinks that he doesn’t really want to be kind to them after all. 

Which is exactly how Sherlock finds himself standing in front of their mother in the sitting room, hands twisted up in the hem of his shirt as he tries to figure out what and how to say what he needs to. He can practically hear Mycroft rolling his eyes in frustration, and for a moment, Sherlock considers again just walking away and leaving this be. It’s such a strange idea just thinking about it in his head, but it’s downright horrible now that they’re all there and he actually has to ask their mother out loud if he can accompany Mycroft back to London. It seemed like such a good idea back in his bedroom. 

It takes him another few moments fighting with words before he finally blurts out the jumbled up mess of words meant to be his request. For a second or two, he thinks he might have to repeat himself, in which case, he decides that he’ll forget the matter all together and pretend as though it never happened. Fortunately, perhaps for them all, their mother understands him perfectly. She may miss the bigger picture when it comes to her youngest, but she isn’t blind to the lack of brotherly bond between her sons. She knows they don’t speak to one another unless necessary, and so she’s rightfully skeptical about the entire ordeal, and for a moment, Sherlock is convinced that him being seventeen and fairly capable of handling himself if given the chance isn’t going to be enough to get her to agree. 

It won’t surprise him if she tells him no. He’s conditioned himself to expect the worst case scenario in all situations, because if things don’t go the way he wants for them to, then at least he’s not horribly let down. When things go right, as rare as those moments are, because he wasn’t expecting it, Sherlock is allowed a moment of genuine surprise and even happiness. 

He thinks he must look extra pathetic that evening, because after only a few moments deliberation, their mother gives Sherlock the answer he’s after. He’s too busy allowing himself to grin to notice the way Mycroft’s shoulders sag just a bit. If he stops to think about the intricacies of this for too long, he knows his mind will be full up of all the different ways Mycroft is subtly making it known that he doesn’t want to deal with Sherlock usually in the first place, let alone back at his flat in the city without their mother to pawn him off on when things get too tense. 

This has disaster written all over it, but Sherlock shoves that thought away as he dashes back up to his room to pack a small bag at his mother’s request. He would have gone as is, but he doesn’t want her to change her mind, so he shoves a shirt, a pair of socks, an extra scarf, a spare notebook, and three books into his bag just in case. He isn’t sure of what he might need at Mycroft’s, but he can’t imagine what else he might have use for that aren’t the clothes he’s wearing or books in case he gets bored. 

He’s back downstairs in less than ten minutes and finds Mycroft and their mother waiting for him on the front steps. He falters only for a moment, fearing that perhaps Mycroft has said something. He realizes that he’s been waiting this entire time for the other shoe to drop, because he’s not allowed these freedoms the way Mycroft is. Their mother smiles and Mycroft doesn’t, but Sherlock thinks this must be his neutral face, because there is no big let down in the form of being told things just aren’t going to work out and that he’s staying put. 

Sherlock is eager to leave and after a few more long moments of menial conversation, their mother bids them goodbye with a kiss to each of their cheeks, and she stares intently at Sherlock for a few seconds longer, long enough to make Sherlock feel uneasy. He knows it’s because this will be the first time he’s been someplace that she hasn’t been, and Sherlock is embarrassed if only because he’s seventeen years old and he knows for a fact that were he normal, this wouldn’t be such a milestone. 

She pats his cheek and tells him to behave. Sherlock knows that his behavior is just the tip of the iceberg, but for once, she’s generous by not mentioning all her other worries. 

When he turns away again he sees a taxi where he expects to see the usual sleek, black company car Mycroft parades around in. The realization washes over him as he slides himself into the car next to his brother with a smug grin of his own. Sherlock casts a glance over his shoulder at their mother still standing on the front steps, her hands on her hips. He’d wave to her if he didn’t think Mycroft would mock him for it, so he turns and sits quietly instead, very much like Mycroft in all regards, and Sherlock doesn’t even realize all the ways he copies his brother; still looking to him when he has questions, but never receiving any proper answers for his efforts. 

“The engine was in need of repairs,” Mycroft supplies haughtily. 

Without being asked, Sherlock notes before he replies with a bored sounding, “Seemed a bit moany the last time you were here, yes.” 

The sarcasm is duly noted on both their parts and neither one of them speak again until the taxi pulls up to the curb at the station and Mycroft pays the driver generously. Sherlock suspects that it’s Mycroft’s way of reminding Sherlock of his important government position, but Mycroft’s job has never meant much to Sherlock in the long run. He thinks it must be tedious, though he decides that if Mycroft is happy with it, then he should be too. 

They take a train back to London, one of Sherlock’s favorite things to do if he can make it through the station in one piece. The awkward time of night affords him the peace that comes from the practically deserted village station. Sherlock spends the few hours they have sitting across from Mycroft and mentally taking notes, since he suspects it might seem suspicious of him to take out his note book and scribble what he sees down in plain sight. Mycroft dresses to impress, that much is obvious, but impressing _who_ is the question Sherlock wants answered. It’s certainly not him and their mother has been impressed enough to last two life times, he’s sure of it. He concludes that he needs more data and files it away to return to later. 

The train glides into the station some time later and Sherlock has his face pressed against the window, watching as people and the platform slow from a blur to recognizable shapes. Mycroft, who has looked as though he may legitimately pass away from having to stoop so low as to ride a train with the lowly common folk, now looks thoroughly pleased with himself for having survived the trip. 

He had been soothed by the distance and the nerves had all but left him until he realizes the small village station is one thing, but it’s something else entirely in the city and knowing that just on the other side of those sliding doors, there is a whole cacophony of city sounds, of crying children up past their bedtimes, of angry business men in their posh suits like Mycroft, of the musician playing an off key tune that rattles his very nerve endings. 

And Sherlock thinks he must be doing well because he gets off the train on his own, sticking close to Mycroft, his fingers just reaching out for the hem of Mycroft’s jacket. He doesn’t actually take hold and the fleeting thoughts of _if I just reached a bit further…_ flicker out as everything else flickers on and in and fills his head up with sharp, grating things; things that block and inhibit and turn dull things into blindingly bright things that hurt his eyes. As though a switch has been flipped in his brain, the world seems to speed up at a rate he can’t process and it renders him motionless and very much unable. 

He tells himself to fight it. Just ignore it and the problems will just melt away. It’s what his mother and a few therapists have told him, but try as he might, he can never fully control what does and does not put him on edge or send him right on over. He stops by a pillar covered in grimy flyers and puts his hands over his ears, shutting his eyes tightly. The success of this technique varies and depends upon a lot of different variables, but in the middle of a too crowded train station with Mycroft nowhere in sight, he doesn’t have much of a choice. 

Blocking out two of his senses doesn’t seem to be doing much, because even the blood rushing through his veins is far too much. It seems a bit pathetic that ones own lifeblood can be such a distressing thing. His whimper vibrates around in his skull like clanging metal, along with it a sense of anxiety and loathing that he can’t make it through something as simple as walking through a train station. He tries to rationalize it as not getting out very often, that he’s simply overwhelmed in the same way every other person sometimes is overwhelmed. Other people can handle loud sounds and train stations without feeling like they’re going to burst apart though, he knows this and tries not to think too much about it, because his sense of inferiority is large enough without having to add to it. 

Sweat prickles at his hairline and warm tears burn at the corners of his eyes. He’s seconds away from curling in on himself further, sliding down the pillar and wrapping himself tightly around his knees, but just as that thought finalizes itself, solidifying into an image he can see in his mind, a large, strong hand wraps around his right upper arm. He knows without needing to look that it’s Mycroft. With a gentle tug Sherlock is putting one calculated foot in front of the other, counting his paces and cracking his eyes open enough to see the blurry motions of his trainers over dirty pavement. Mycroft has to let go of his arm at one point to get through the crowd and Sherlock stops in his tracks until Mycroft’s hand is leading him again through pressure against his lower back, steering him through the worst of the maze until Sherlock is met with a soft gust of chilly night time air. 

The sensations dull and are replaced with embarrassment over a number of things that Sherlock tries to push back to some dark crevice of his mind. He’s embarrassed that he’s had another episode in public, where there are eyes to watch and ears to hear and minds and hearts to judge, where Mycroft can see just as well as any that he’s still the same as he ever was. Forcing himself to grow out of these things doesn’t seem to work, and he avoids looking at Mycroft until he feels his brother’s hands on his shoulders to steady him from the gentle swaying motion he takes on. 

Sherlock lets his hands down from his ears and stares at Mycroft’s chin as Mycroft in turn worries his lip, feeling very out of place and unsure, with a very healthy dose of regret that he doesn’t know how to better help Sherlock. Though that feeling isn’t lasting and is replaced firmly by the notion that the distance between them is better than anything. Even when Sherlock unfolds his arms and leans forward for the embrace he thinks he should not be so used to still, Mycroft locks his elbows and keeps Sherlock at arms length just as he always does. Mycroft walks to the curb and hails a taxi before Sherlock can even register what’s happened. 

There are far too many other things to think about than to dwell on what happened at the train station, though Sherlock endeavors never to let that happen again if it’s the last thing he does. He needs to prove to himself and to everybody else that he can be independent and he can do things like everybody else around him just as well, if not better. He pays attention to the route the cabbie takes them in case he should ever lose his way, and by the time they slow to a stop in front of a row of townhouses, Sherlock has added a whole new section to his mind map of London. 

He’s out of the car before his brother, taking in the surroundings and trying to fit Mycroft in with them all. He must admit that he’s a bit disappointed, because he was rather expecting to find a palace with the way Mycroft goes on and on about how important his job is and all. The townhouses aren’t modest, but neither are they extravagant; not something Mycroft would have picked for himself, but something that Sherlock knows Mycroft wouldn’t turn down just to keep up his image with his employers, Sherlock is certain. 

Mycroft pays the man and steps up to the front door, searching around his suit jacket for his house keys. Sherlock watches in fascination, because Mycroft and mundane things never seem to go hand in hand. He doesn’t have keys in his jacket pocket, but he presses his hand to his chest where a pocket might be if he had them. The key slides into the lock with a satisfying hitch-click and then a dark foyer meets them. It’s a bit anticlimactic once Mycroft switches the lights on, but Sherlock does well to hide his disappointment. He sometimes forgets that his brother is a normal person, despite his attitude, and while Mycroft busies himself with checking his phone messages, Sherlock wanders with purpose into the living room on the hunt for more disappointingly dull things in his brother’s life. 

He isn’t disappointed either. There’s a sofa and a chair of average quality, and bookshelves with more books than Sherlock thinks is strictly necessary for Mycroft’s lifestyle. If he really is doing all those great things like he says he does, Sherlock wonders where Mycroft might find the time to read anything besides the back of a cereal box, and Sherlock definitely delights in the knowledge that Mycroft eats cereal like the average middle class grunt. 

Sherlock makes mental notes of little things like the most read books he can find by spines not quite in perfect shape, and the fact that there are tracks in the dust where Mycroft has taken some books off the shelf more often than others. He pauses briefly for a moment when he catches a florally scent, lavender perhaps, and makes a connection in his mind that obviously Mycroft might have a lady friend of some sort. It’s foolish to believe otherwise, but Sherlock doesn’t like to think about Mycroft having other people in his life. If he can’t be in it, Sherlock thinks selfishly that he doesn’t want anybody else in it either. 

On a shelf about shoulder height, Sherlock discovers Mycroft’s university diploma nicely framed next to a photo of him in his cap and gown. He stands with their mother in the sunlight on bright green grass, looking proud. Their mother looks proud too. Sherlock thinks that he would’ve looked the same if he had been there; if there had been a ticket and a seat for him there, but there hadn’t been. It took Sherlock a long time to figure out that he hadn’t been invited, but he’s never brought it up because he doesn’t want to spoil such a good moment in his brother’s life. 

“Did she take a lot of photographs?” he abruptly asks out loud. He hadn’t seen Mycroft come back into the room, but he can tell he’s there. 

Mycroft blinks at him over his newspaper and shakes it open in his lap before he replies with a noncommittal sort of hum. 

“Mummy. Did she take a lot of photographs?” 

“Of what? Oh, the ceremony?” 

“Mm.” 

“I suppose she did. If she didn’t do it herself, she surely hired somebody to do it for her. I’ll tell you I can’t really remember, to be honest.” 

Sherlock blinks at the photo and tips his head to the side. “I wish I could have gone.” 

Mycroft remembers the day well, how he had spent weeks begging their mother not to bring Sherlock, how, if she did, he had told her that he wouldn’t walk at all at the ceremony. The price of not seeing her eldest son complete university was more steep than upsetting Sherlock’s feelings at the time. Besides, even then Mycroft hardly thought that Sherlock would have minded, all things considered, but that didn’t take away the dark feeling that lodged itself in his throat. 

“You know there-” he pauses to clear his throat, “You know there were only a certain number of tickets available for the event.” 

“Yes… But when it’s my turn, I’ll buy your ticket first.” 

Sherlock says the words with such startling simplicity that Mycroft does a double take and finds that for once, he isn’t equipped with a snarky reply. The only thing he has rattling around is a cold stone of guilt that seems to be growing larger at a rather alarming rate. 

As with a lot of accidentally profound things Sherlock has said, he doesn’t realize the true nature of his words, only meaning for them to be taken exactly as they were said. If he ever completes university, it would just be logical to buy the appropriate amount of tickets first so as not to be left in the position his brother had been in. There isn’t any hidden agenda with Sherlock’s words, but he can’t help if Mycroft reads them differently. 

Mycroft leaves Sherlock to it and returns to his newspaper in a vain attempt at normality. If Sherlock wasn’t there with him, this is exactly what he would be doing, but Sherlock is there; this presence in his space that Mycroft can’t close out no matter how intently he stares at the words he means to read. He’s gone years without purposefully being in the same space as his brother. To suddenly be tossed together is something that Mycroft is having a difficult time accepting, as benign as this entire encounter has been so far. He gives up trying to read the papers shortly thereafter and snaps it shut with a sigh and a weary hand to his brow. 

“Where did you get that?” 

Glancing up at Sherlock with little interest, far too focused on other things, Mycroft sees his brother pointing with his fist at the hideous fruit bat mounted under glass that graces his mantel, courtesy of his employer. It’s an ugly thing, but Mycroft leaves it up in the off chance his employer is ever around long enough to care about what sits upon his mantelpiece. He wakes up each day and thinks to himself that by that evening, he’ll throw it in the bin, but he never does. And though he hates the beast, he hates the thought of Sherlock touching his things even more; a residual grudge still held from their childhood when Sherlock couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Some things never change. 

“It was a gift. Don’t touch it.” 

Sherlock likes things under glass. He finds them to be fascinating specimens and the moment he saw the bat (a fruit bat, he suspects) surrounded by beetles, Sherlock knew he had to get a closer look. Maybe he could find out where Mycroft purchased it and get one for his own room back home. He’s reminded mere seconds into his excitement that he’s forgotten he’s not allowed to touch Mycroft’s things and he draws his arm back to his chest, fingers curled over his thumb so he won’t be tempted further. 

The disappointment flickers momentarily over Sherlock’s face, but he’s learned to hide it well. It was stupid of him to think he might be able to strike up a conversation with a brother that he knows already can hardly tolerate him. For a moment, Sherlock thinks about apologizing for insisting he come along on this little venture. They can just as easily have sat in awkward silence in their own homes and none would be the wiser for it. 

Sherlock catches Mycroft’s movement out of the corner of his eye and turns his head a little to watch him stand and straighten himself out before putting a hand in his pocket and glancing around as though he’s forgotten something. 

“Half past nine,” Sherlock supplies, inching a bit closer to the mantel. If he can’t hold it in his hands, he supposes it’ll be alright if he gets a closer look at the bat. 

“How did you- ?” 

“You’re not wearing a watch and you were looking around. I know how to tell time. I always know what time it is.” 

“Right… Right. Well, I suppose… Are you hungry then? It’s a bit late, but I could order something in. Need to do the shopping. I haven’t had the time, you know, with such a busy schedule. Sherlock, are you even paying attention to me? No. No of course you’re not.” 

Sherlock’s made it to the mantel and leans in close enough to see his breath fog over the glass, finger prints and smudges appearing like magic. Other people have touched it, but he’s not allowed to. There’s a strange sort of irony in that, but Sherlock isn’t particularly fond of that kind of humor. He’s vaguely aware that Mycroft is standing shoulder to shoulder with him now, regarding the bat much in the same way Sherlock is. Only, where Sherlock is fascinated by the intricacies of bone structure, Mycroft is horrified that there’s a petrified fleabag in such close proximity to his person. 

He pulls back with a shudder and observes Sherlock in much the same way. “You have _bathed_ recently, haven’t you?” 

When his personal hygiene came into the picture is a mystery, and Sherlock wonders if he should be offended by that question and what Mycroft is implying, but there are more pressing matters at hand than his brother’s superior in every way complex. 

“Don’t like wet hair,” he says instead with a shrug. 

He does not add that he showered the day before, because it’s none of Mycroft’s business whatsoever anyway, and besides, he’s absolutely delighted in the way Mycroft’s expression changes as though he’s just discovered he’s standing next to a person with an infectious disease. 

Rolling his eyes so hard they actually ache, Mycroft drops the subject and instead asks for Sherlock’s coat. The flat is boiling. Mycroft hasn’t had the time (or extra money, though he’d never admit it) to fix the thermostat. It was actually useful in the winter months, but spring is upon the city full force, and waking up each morning drenched in one’s own sweat isn’t exactly a party. 

Sherlock doesn’t want to take off his coat, but he reasons that he has his scarf and he should be okay with just that, so he shrugs out of his jacket and holds it out in Mycroft’s direction. His eyes are still transfixed on the bat, cataloguing each minute detail so he can hunt for the correct species name later on. His sleeve drags up a bit as he extends his arm out, and Mycroft reaches for it, but his hand takes a decidedly different route and clamps around Sherlock’s skinny wrist. 

“Sherlock, really,” he tuts, lifting Sherlock’s arm up to better see the bruises. It takes no genius to distinguish teeth marks from pale flesh. 

The embarrassment of being caught, of having somebody know he still does _that_ is enough to freeze Sherlock to the spot, barely only able to breathe. He flexes his hand in Mycroft’s grip as the other pushes his sleeve further up his arm to reveal even more bite marks. Sherlock had taken to wearing longer sleeves when he realized he needed to hide that part of himself away. He never used to bite himself so hard, but now he bites with purpose. He bites to bruise. 

“I suppose your other arm is like this too?” Mycroft asks. The disappointment is glaringly evident. “What would Mother think? You’ll upset her.” 

Sherlock blinks rapidly and finally glances in the other direction, opposite Mycroft. He tries to engage his mind in the bookshelves he hasn’t seen yet, anything at all to not be present for the conversation his brother is desperate to have with him. What good it will do anyway as it’s not exactly a big secret that Sherlock does bad things that disappoint his family members. He’s grown used to it, so why haven’t they? 

Mycroft only releases his hand when he’s been sufficiently ignored by Sherlock long enough that pressing the issue becomes pointless. Sherlock begins to wander away, leaving their hands connected until Mycroft lets go with an indiscernible mutter as he turns into the kitchen. 

Sherlock tugs repeatedly at his shirt sleeves and tries to fight the sensation of his skin crawling. Mycroft digs angrily through the messy pile of take away menus, fighting with himself over whether or not he should phone their mother. The poor women is under the impression Sherlock has stopped his bad behaviors all together, but it’s a battle that Mycroft can’t seem to get his whole heart into for some reason or another. He decides if he ignores the problem, then for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t really exist, and what their mother doesn’t know won’t hurt her and won’t involve him any more in their lives than strictly necessary. He doesn’t think of it as a lie, technically, when he says to himself that this is for his own benefit. 

Sherlock can hear Mycroft shuffling through papers in the kitchen, the telltale sticky sound of pages being pulled apart tell him they must be menus. His stomach gives a weak jump in anticipation. He hadn’t thought of having to eat while there, but surely he knows Mycroft will definitely report back that he hadn’t, and so he must. It’s a revolting thought, because it’s not his own food on his own plate, and god only knows how their food will have been prepared if it’s a take away. The thought makes him anxious and he snorts quietly to himself when he catches himself thinking _a bite here will dull the sensations there_ … 

He’s in the middle of mentally berating himself when Mycroft reappears, holding a phone and a sticky menu in his hands. 

“I thought Chinese,” he says, scanning over the different selections. He’s oblivious to Sherlock’s discomfort at the idea. “Do you know what you would like? No. Pardon me, I forgot you only eat five things, all bland as anything. I’ll get you some sort of noodle dish then. Harmless enough.” 

Sherlock knows well to pick and choose his battles too, and rehashing the food argument is something that he doesn’t really feel like going through again. Another confrontation on Sherlock’s picky eating habits isn’t going to rid Mycroft of the urge to pick at the issue until it’s well and truly beaten down. Sherlock knows it’s an easy target and he lets Mycroft take it. He knows it makes his brother feel better about things in general anyway. It’s a small price to pay to keep the peace. 

The near hour that passes between Mycroft calling in their order and when the doorbell actually rings passes by in a painfully slow crawl. Mycroft feels as though his space is being invaded, though the most Sherlock does is poke at a book or a trinket on the shelf with mild interest. He has no big secrets to keep hidden, and yet he feels anxious, because he knows if anybody can sniff out a secret, it’s his brother. 

Sherlock doesn’t sit on the available sofa, because Mycroft’s mantra of ‘don’t touch my things, Sherlock’ repeats itself any time he hovers near enough. He knows it’s absurd and that the likelihood of Mycroft actually telling him ‘no, get up off the sofa, you’re not allowed to sit’ is very slim. Sherlock would rather not take the chances. His brother’s things are his brother’s things. Sherlock ought to know by now, he’s told it enough. 

The doorbell is an awkwardly piercing sort of sound, off tone in exactly all the wrong ways, and Sherlock rubs his hands over his ears to off set it. He passes off the movements as though he had an itch, but Mycoft wasn’t there to see anyway, too busy paying the delivery man and juggling a slightly greasy paper bag with what Sherlock assumes must be enough boxes of food to feed any person for a good long while. The smell of it doesn’t exactly lend itself to something Sherlock would be interested in eating and his suspicions are confirmed when Mycroft pulls out a plump carton and sets it in front of him. 

Sherlock’s never had Chinese food before and really, he doesn’t think he wants to start trying it now. The moist steam rises as he pulls open the tabs curiously. The pungent aroma of spices and savory-sour sauces is nearly a punch to the face, and Sherlock can’t help but compare the noodles to some sort of slippery bug he may find in a rancid pond. He’s suddenly not very hungry at all, even if before his stomach was jumping at the idea of noodles. 

“Are you going to stand there all night then?” Mycroft asks and Sherlock wonders when Mycroft had the time to find eating utensils, take off his suit jacket, roll up his sleeves to the elbow, and eat half of a greasy eggroll already. 

He drops delicately into the chair opposite Mycroft. The table is a far cry from the extravagant one in the dinning room back home, and Sherlock accidentally treads on his brother’s toes more than once as he tries to find a comfortable way to fold himself into an unfamiliar seat. He settles perched upon his knees and looming over his own take away container like a predator over prey, though Sherlock corrects this image in his head, because as a predator, he would have to be a lot more willing than this. Not to mention the nauseated look on his face as he pulls a few forkfuls of lo mein onto his plate is a far cry from the ravenous expression of a proper predator. 

Sherlock tries valiantly to make this work for himself, and Mycroft watches in a mixture of amusement and impatience as Sherlock finally talks himself into taking a small bite, only to spit it back out into his napkin as discreetly as possible a half second later. What he thought were shorter noodles in fact turned out to be something quite different, triggering his gag reflex despite his best efforts to keep his composure. He spends the next ten minutes separating all the bits and pieces of the dish into separate corners of his plate. Going clockwise from twelve: bean sprouts, peanuts, mushrooms, tiny bits of green onion, tinier bits of garlic, a pile of cold noodles, and a piece of what Sherlock thinks may be chicken, though he has his doubts. 

Mycroft watches Sherlock chase a mushroom around his plate as he pops the last pork dumpling into his mouth. “You hate it, don’t you?” 

Sherlock freezes and thinks about the best way to answer this simple question being asked of him. In truth, he absolutely hates every single thing that’s on his plate at the moment, but how rude he will be if he says any of this, because as Mycroft’s guest, he should be grateful. He should eat what’s served to him with no fuss. Mummy would have an absolute heart attack if she ever finds out that Sherlock spit food into his napkin. 

“It’s alright if you do, you know,” Mycroft adds. His full and satisfied belly has put him in a better humor. 

Mycroft takes Sherlock’s silence as confirmation and stands, closing up all the boxes and setting them on the counter to put away later once they’ve cooled. Sherlock is mostly worried that he’s offended Mycroft and knows he should apologize, but he doesn’t want to get into it. He wants this visit to go smoothly. He wants to be able to report back to their mother that things went well for him and Mycroft for once, because he knows it’d make her smile. So he puts supper out of his mind, deciding he wasn’t very hungry in the first place, and moves to get up from the table as well. 

“Sit,” Mycroft says and Sherlock does, looking up at his brother with wide eyes. “I have pasta and spaghetti sauce. Nothing fancy.” 

“You don’t have to-” 

“I know I don’t have to. You think I can’t hear your stomach rumbling all the way over here? Mummy would murder me if I didn’t feed you at some point.” 

Sherlock smiles for a moment as Mycroft turns his back. He remembers all the times Mycroft brought him something that he would eat when he had been sent to the nursery for having one of his episodes. A half a cheese sandwich with a cold glass of milk was the usual, and then a book to ease him further into calmness. Sitting there at Mycroft’s small table, Sherlock realizes with a sudden and nearly crippling sadness that he misses the time before all his flaws chased his best friend away, though he understands why Mycroft did what he did. He would probably leave himself behind if he were capable too. 

He signs ‘thank you’ when Mycroft sets his new supper in front of him and without thinking about it, Mycroft signs ‘you’re welcome’ back. Things feel normal for a few moments, before Mycroft gruffly clears his throat and sits across from him again with a serious look on his face. 

“You have to stop doing that, Sherlock. You’re not deaf. You can hear perfectly well, so _use your words_.” 

“I don’t have words.” 

“Yes you do! Just then, you used your words. What’s so difficult about that?” 

“I don’t have words,” Sherlock repeats and twirls the noodles around his fork. “Words have purpose and words mean things. People have words. I don’t _have_ them.” 

Mycroft doesn’t understand, will _never_ understand, and therein lies the problem. Sherlock isn’t going to waste his energy on trying to explain. He wishes Mycroft didn’t have words; that their places were reversed and it could be Sherlock’s turn to inflict hurt instead of being the catch all easy target for everybody else’s hostility. 

The minutes pass slowly and Sherlock expects Mycroft to have some clever retort on hand to show him once again how backwards he is, but the silence remains between them. Only the clinking of his fork against the bowl and the occasional creaking of their chairs can be heard. If their mother were there, the room would be full up of conversations and laughter and praise for Mycroft, but with just the two of them it’s as though somebody very important to them has died. 

A few tense moments later, Mycroft asks, “Are you sad, Sherlock?” 

He thinks Sherlock must be to look so downtrodden all of the time. It’s part of the reason Mycroft doesn’t like spending time with him, because the bleakness seems to radiate off his brother and it’s a constant, harsh reminder that things are not well between them, and mostly it’s his own fault. He gets on so well on his own now, without having his little brother hanging about as a distraction. Mycroft has to constantly remind himself that this is a good thing, because there is always this nagging, little doubt in the back of his mind, reminding him that he should have done better. 

Sherlock pushes at a noodle with his fork and pretends he didn’t hear Mycroft’s question. Would his brother even believe him if he answered it honestly? 

He thinks _sometimes I cry and I don’t know why, just that my heart hurts deep in my chest_ , but he asks, “Isn’t everybody?” 

Mycroft isn’t expecting a reply, already scolding himself for being so bold as to ask such a thing, but when Sherlock speaks up finally, he’s a bit caught off guard and understandably so. It’s another one of those moments, those accidentally profound moments that Sherlock stumbles into by mistake, and all Mycroft can do is stare at him. Isn’t everybody? Mycroft didn’t learn that lesson until well into his twenties. Sherlock must have figured it out years ago. 

“No. They’re not.” 

“Are you sad?” 

Mycroft blinks. “Yes.” 

“Why?” 

He has Sherlock’s full attention now, something that is all at once reassuring and unsettling; something Mycroft hasn’t had in years, and something he hadn’t been aware that perhaps he wanted. Though now, he doesn’t think he can take the intense scrutiny. Sherlock can’t make eye contact, but Mycroft knows he’s soaking in other details of body language and other subtleties that he convinces himself Sherlock can’t comprehend to save himself the discomfort. 

The question is so simple, so agonizingly plain and innocent that Mycroft’s breath catches for a moment in his chest. He doesn’t even know where to begin. He doesn’t know how to turn it into something Sherlock might understand. He isn’t even sure that he wants to go there at all with Sherlock, yet he knows he brought it on himself with asking that first devastating question of his brother that he already knows the answer to in his heart. 

“You wouldn’t understand,” Mycroft says tersely and excuses himself from the table, dumping dirty dishes loudly into the tiny sink. 

He doesn’t miss Sherlock’s quiet, “No, I never do.” 

He clutches the glass in his hand so tightly he fears it might shatter in his palm and he thinks what a relief that would be.


End file.
